


Sudden and Silent in its Arrival

by PhoenixFalls



Series: Sudden and Silent in its Arrival [1]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe, Canon Divergence, F/M, Lost/Stranded Somewhere, M/M, Multi, POV Female Character, Polyamory, Queer Themes, Road Trip, Slow Build, Small Towns
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-24
Updated: 2016-07-31
Packaged: 2018-07-26 11:13:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 24,705
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7572040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PhoenixFalls/pseuds/PhoenixFalls
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>22 1/2 hours of drive time, 1,461 miles of increasingly icy roads, and Los Angeles still isn't far enough back in Pepper's rearview mirror. But when her car breaks down just over the South Dakota state line, she meets a pair of men who give her a reason to stop running.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Started for NaNoWriMo 2015, finished for WIP Big Bang.
> 
> There is a fantastic fanmix for this fic [here](http://prosodiical.livejournal.com/16726.html), by prosodiical. Please check it out as well!

Just past Victorville Pepper blew a flat. Of course the 2004 Hyundai Accent she had bought used had only a donut for a spare. She had gotten as far as pulling it out and jacking up the car and was scrambling through the glove compartment for the bolt lock when a middle-aged Latino man and his son pulled over and offered their assistance in finishing the job. The father, who introduced himself as Jose, also offered to lead her to a used tire place run by a cousin of his that would stay open late if he called, but it was several miles off the highway to the southwest and Pepper refused to drive even one mile back towards L.A. She assured him she’d take it slow and get the donut switched out the instant she hit Barstow, and he packed her flat back in the trunk for her and told her to be safe.

In Jackson, Wyoming, Pepper ran into a checkpoint that turned her back for her lack of snow chains; she lost half a day to finding a store in town that had chains that fit her tires. Just as she was congratulating herself on navigating that setback one of the chains came loose and she had to pull over to the shoulder to refasten and tighten them again.

But she didn’t truly regret crunching her state-of-the-art iPhone under the heel of her sharpest stiletto until she was driving east on a deserted stretch of highway a few miles past the Wyoming/South Dakota state line. She flicked on her headlights only to find them dim and fading immediately. Then her radio cut out. When she braked to pull to the shoulder, her engine died.

The hazard lights didn’t work either, and the November sunset was failing fast, so after a moment spent banging her forehead against the steering wheel and stringing together her most creative set of curse words, Pepper hopped out to pull the emergency kit from the trunk and set up the reflective triangles. It wasn’t even five o’clock yet, so Pepper decided to stay put and see if she could flag down the next passing car. Her Triple-A membership was good through January, so all she really needed to do was borrow a cell phone.

It took long enough that she was beginning to make pro/con lists for bunking down overnight in the dubious shelter of her backseat versus pulling on as many layers as possible and walking in the cold and dark the four miles back down the highway to Beulah. (Population: 33, and it was toward rather than away from California, but the next town going forward was almost ten miles farther on and Pepper wasn’t an idiot.) The weather report in the motel paper that morning had forecast an overnight low of 24, but it was supposed to be clear, the moon was near full, and Pepper had a reflective windbreaker in the emergency kit. She had just about decided to walk when she spotted headlights coming up the highway from the west.

The headlights belonged to a black F-250 that thankfully flipped on its hazards and pulled over even before Pepper had fully scrambled out to wave her flashlight around. Pepper only got a quick glance of the driver when his cabin lights switched on as he opened his door – a thin Black man, probably a few years older than Pepper herself, wearing a heavy flannel jacket and a cowboy hat – and then he stepped in front of the headlights and became just a silhouette and the sound of booted footsteps on the gravel.

When he got a little closer he flicked on a little LED flashlight hanging from his keychain so that Pepper could see the badge he had pulled from his pocket. “I’m Lieutenant James Rhodes, Spearfish PD. What seems to be the trouble, ma’am?”

For a slightly hysterical moment Pepper considered wailing “Everything,” but she swallowed the impulse. “I really don’t know. I was just driving along when everything died – lights, radio, engine. There wasn’t any smoke or anything, but I haven’t been able to turn anything on since. If you have a phone I can borrow I’ll just call for a tow truck—“

“Eh, we’ll let Mike enjoy his dinner. Sounds like your alternator. We can try giving it a jump, see if we can give your battery enough juice to get you into town if you’d like. I’ve got jumper cables in the back.”

Fifteen minutes later, it was clear that was not going to do the trick. Lieutenant Rhodes slammed the hood and began winding the cables back up. “Well, we’ve got a couple choices. I can call Mike to tow you into town, but it’ll probably be 45 minutes before he can get here with his truck. But if you’re feeling up for a little pushing, I can tow you myself – I just happen to be rigged up with a dolly tonight, and your car’s well under my max towing limit. We could probably have you someplace warm in under half an hour that way.”

Pepper blinked, wishing there was enough light to read the Lieutenant’s expression. But she was cold, and she had switched her sandals for boots while she was waiting for someone to drive by, and men always underestimated her strength, so, “I’ll take the passenger side.”

The Lieutenant maneuvered his truck with ease, and the dolly was low enough that they managed to push her front wheels onto it in one shot, and then Pepper was sitting in the cab of his truck still panting just a bit while he tied her car down and tossed her reflective triangles back into her trunk. When he pulled himself up onto the bench seat Pepper flashed him her most grateful smile, but he seemed distracted, not quite meeting her eyes and tapping his fingers on his steering wheel.

He put the truck in drive and pulled slowly back onto the highway, then pulled out his phone.

Pepper could just hear the ringing over the sound of the engine, and she closed her eyes to better eavesdrop, wondering what the Lieutenant wasn’t telling her.

Two rings and a female voice answered. “And what can I do for a member of our fine police force this evening?”

“Margie, got a bit of a situation here, hoping you can help me out. Last you checked, there any rooms left in town tonight?”

“Oh, honey, did the wife kick you out? You know you’re always welcome to my couch if you need it, and if you give it a bit of thought I bet there’s even some beds around town you wouldn’t be kicked out of. . .”

Pepper could hear the smile in the Lieutenant’s voice. “Nah, don’t need the room for myself, and I don’t need you spreading any rumors either. Picked up a traveler on the 90E, she looks to be stranded for the weekend and needs someplace to bed down.”

“Oooh, that’s a tough one. You could try checking with Dani, but that’s about it – even the Lodge and the Super 8 are all booked up through Sunday night.”

The Lieutenant huffed. “Of course. Okay, thanks Marge. Tell Bill I’ll be by to pick up the trout sometime tomorrow or Monday.”

“Come Monday, I’ll have a couple jars of apple chutney to toss in the basket too.”

“Looking forward to it.”

The Lieutenant hung up, then sighed. “Unfortunately, it’s Family Weekend at BHSU, and there just aren’t enough hotels and motels here to handle the influx of people. Marge runs the town travel agency, so if she says there’re no rooms, there’re no rooms.”

Pepper decided that the Lieutenant was assuming she had been listening in. “And Dani is. . . ?”

“Dani sometimes rents out her upstairs bedrooms since her kids moved away, but I know for a fact she decided to skip this year’s craziness and is off visiting her grandkids right now.”

“Ah.” In the silence, the Lieutenant’s finger-tapping picked up speed.

Pepper was about to ask how far it was to the next closest town with a motel when the Lieutenant spoke again. “I have a spare bedroom, if you feel safe enough with me. Otherwise, we’ll probably have to go all the way to Sturgis to find a place with a vacancy.”

Pepper bit her lip, thinking. Nothing thus far in their interaction had struck her as worrisome – he’d behaved entirely professionally, and with an understated kindness. He was, apparently, married; he hadn’t hesitated to let the woman on the phone know that Pepper was with him. He was a cop, and speaking of – “May I take a closer look at your badge?”

“Of course.” He handed it over and even turned on the cabin light for her.

The badge looked real, given Pepper’s limited experience with law enforcement in general and complete lack of experience with the police department of Spearfish, South Dakota. And in the glances she stole out of the corner of her eye, the Lieutenant’s face showed nothing but patience for her examination, and there were more laugh lines around his eyes than frown lines around his mouth.

Her gut said she could trust him, that she was safe with him. But her gut had been proven catastrophically wrong before, and Pepper felt her heart beating double-time as she imagined what might happen if she said yes and was wrong yet again.

Then the Lieutenant twisted his mouth wryly. “The bedroom door does lock from the inside, and while I can’t loan you a gun, I’m more than happy to give you a can of mace to keep on the bedside table, if that would help you sleep more soundly.”

Pepper found herself giggling. “All right, fuck it. If you don’t mind putting me up, I won’t make you drive me that far out of your way. You have to let me pay you whatever the going rate for a night is, though.”

The Lieutenant’s teeth flashed white in a surprisingly attractive smile. “That really won’t be necessary, ma’am.”

* * *

They turned off the highway and onto what Pepper assumed was Spearfish’s main drag. There was more activity here, not to mention actual streetlights, but even though it was barely 6:30, most of the town already looked shut down for the night.

A couple turns and the houses started getting further and further apart, and then they were meandering down a narrow drive that ended in a gravel clearing in front of a slightly ramshackle Craftsman-style home. There was a big, wrap-around porch well-lit by lanterns, and more of the windows were lit than not, giving Pepper intriguing glimpses of living and dining rooms on the first floor, bedrooms on the second, and a really impressive number of overflowing bookcases.

“Every light on again, of course…” the Lieutenant muttered under his breath, shaking his head and putting the truck into park. Pepper caught just the hint of a dimple around his mouth, and his voice was fond. She felt a little more of her nervousness abate.

The Lieutenant grabbed Pepper’s suitcase from her trunk and held the front door open for her then led her toward the back of the house, pointing out the kitchen and bathroom on the way. A short walk down a dark hallway and he was pushing the door open on something that felt like a spare bedroom even before he turned on the light – it was still and close, and it had that indefinable air of disuse. But when he flicked the light switch, turning on a mismatched pair of lamps that spilled golden light on a neat bed covered in a patchwork quilt, the room felt surprisingly homey.

He settled Pepper’s suitcase against the door of what looked like a closet, then retreated to the doorway. “I’ll let you get settled. Make yourself at home, and I’ll go see if there’s a plan for dinner already.” And then he was gone.

Pepper shed her outer clothes and, after a moment of thought, her boots as well, stowing them neatly in the closet. Nothing in her suitcase needed hanging, so she left it packed for the moment. She flopped down on the bed and stared blankly up at the wood-beamed ceiling, resolutely not thinking about anything the way she hadn’t been thinking about anything since she left L.A.

It took too much willpower, so before doubts and regrets could creep in, she pushed herself back upright and decided to follow the sound of voices back into the main part of the house.

Lieutenant Rhodes was in the kitchen, back to Pepper, head stuck through a further door so he could talk to his wife, presumably. Pepper was just about to clear her throat to let him know she was in the room when he pulled himself back out and spotted her.

He ducked back through the doorway one more time. “Get out here, lemme introduce you to her.”

Pepper heard surprisingly low-pitched grumbling in response, then a man pushed himself through the doorway, ducking under the Lieutenant’s arm to take a look at her.

Pepper knew her surprise showed on her face, so she wasn’t put off when the man narrowed his eyes at her, crossed his arms in front of himself and snuggled defiantly back into Lieutenant Rhodes’s chest. The Lieutenant, meanwhile, had pulled on a deliberately bland expression.

“This is my husband, Tony. Tony, this is. . .” He trailed off, his expression turning embarrassed, and Pepper realized she had never actually introduced herself to him. She shook herself out of her surprise and stepped forward with her hand extended confidently.

“I’m Pepper Potts. It’s a pleasure to meet you. I really can’t thank you enough for putting me up for the night.”

Tony studied her for a moment, then relaxed and took her hand in a firm, warm shake. His hand was rough with calluses and only indifferently cleaned of what looked like engine grease, and Pepper was blindsided by a sense-memory of her father’s big blunt hands patiently taking her through the steps of replacing her broken bike chain when she was twelve.

Dear god she was getting maudlin.

Pepper realized they had been shaking hands for far longer was customary, and she pulled her hand back to her side quickly. Tony grinned knowingly at her, brown eyes twinkling, and pushed himself away from his husband to step into the kitchen proper, striding to the sink to start scrubbing his hands and forearms.

“Not a problem, I never mind taking in Rhodey’s strays.”

Pepper took a deep breath to stop herself from bristling. “Well as I said, I’m very grateful. I’d probably still be sitting on the side of the road if it weren’t for Lieutenant Rhodes.”

Tony made a face, and the Lieutenant spoke from just over Pepper’s shoulder. “Oh, please, call me Jim.” He moved past her to join Tony at the counter. Without any communication Pepper could catch, they began the process of making dinner.

It was fascinating to watch the two men work together. The kitchen wasn’t particularly large, and the space was dominated by an oversized wood island, but they weaved around each other with the subconscious awareness of people who have shared the same space for years, maybe decades. Tony seemed to be in charge of the stove, getting a big pasta pot heating over a high flame, then doctoring a jar of tomato sauce with what seemed like an endless array of dried herbs and spices; Jim wielded a chef’s knife like a pro, dicing neat piles of vegetables first to add to the sauce, then to add to a bag of lettuce for a tossed salad.

Pepper hovered on the other side of the island, running her fingers over the chipped tile of the countertop, and cast about for some way to help. Eyes settling on the dining table in the next room, she asked “What cabinet do you keep your plates in?”

Jim turned quickly, hands still gripping both knife and cucumber. “Oh, that isn’t necessary, you should go relax on the sof—“

“Top cabinet, left of the sink,” Tony interrupted, and Pepper gladly set to work. When she came back from laying out three plates, Tony stretched to tap a particular drawer pull, and inside she found the silverware. The napkins she spotted for herself, stuffed into some welded-together metal brackets serving admirably as a holder, and she was just going to ask where the cups were when Tony stepped in front of her abruptly.

“You any good at wine pairings?”

Pepper felt unaccountably nettled, and lifted her chin challengingly. “Try me.”

Tony flashed her that quicksilver grin again, and turned Pepper to face a low doorway she hadn’t quite noticed before. “Wine cellar’s down there. Sauce’ll be kind of spicy, not a real arrabiata, but definitely hotter than your usual marinara.”

The doorway led to a narrow staircase heading down into pitch black. Pepper reached out to tug the chain hanging from a bare bulb, illuminating shallow wood steps and uneven walls.

As the door swung shut behind her, she heard Jim say exasperatedly, “Really, Tony, can’t you even _try_ to be civil…”

At the bottom of the staircase was a fairly small unfinished basement. Pepper stepped past a deep freezer chest and several shelves stuffed full of a wide selection of jarred and canned goods, and then she spotted the wine racks.

It was a far more impressive selection than Pepper expected, and she had the distinct impression she was being tested. So she took her time, trying to get a sense for the men above her through their taste in alcohol.

The selection definitely skewed Italian, which was unfortunate, because Pepper’s knowledge was deepest in French wines. There was more red than white, and while there were very few bottles that Pepper would have considered expensive, every bottle Pepper recognized displayed a pretty wide-ranging and discerning palate.

Eventually she settled on a fairly inexpensive Sangiovese from a winery she remembered being consistently good, and headed back upstairs.

Tony didn’t go so far as to praise her choice, but he did soften a bit further around the eyes. “Opener and decanter are in the sideboard in the dining room. That one’ll appreciate some time to breathe.” Pepper decided she had passed.

After decanting the bottle, Pepper fiddled with her place settings a bit more, getting everything lined up neatly and evenly spaced, and then Jim and Tony were bringing out the food. At some point Tony must have dropped some meatballs in the sauce, and the pasta and salad were both already tossed and very appetizing against brightly colored ceramic serving bowls. Pepper felt her stomach rumble, and realized she hadn’t bothered to stop for lunch so the last thing she ate was a McMuffin sometime around mid-morning.

Jim must’ve had the ears of a bat, because he clearly heard her stomach’s complaint and smiled down at the bowl he was carrying in response.

“All right, let’s dig in,” was all the grace anybody said, to Pepper’s gratitude.

Nobody said anything for a few minutes, too busy loading their plates and taking their first bites. Then there were the usual pleasantries – “The sauce is delicious” – “The wine really does hold up well against it, good choice” – “Is this vinaigrette homemade?” – but the first real bit of conversation came from Tony.

“So how do you end up being named something like ‘Pepper,’ anyway?”

This was a complication from her unthinking introduction Pepper hadn’t adequately anticipated. Best to go with the truth then. “I was named after my grandmother, but everyone agreed early on that it didn’t suit, and after several other nicknames, Pepper just stuck.”

“But why ‘Pepper’? And is it the spice? The vegetable? Something even more inexplicable?”

Pepper felt an old combativeness well up, but Tony seemed genuinely curious now, not baiting her, so she answered him truthfully again. “I’m afraid I had something of a temper when I was small.”

“The spice then,” and he nodded, satisfied. “To be expected I suppose. You’re a redhead under that high-end dye job, aren’t you?”

Jim was shaking his head helplessly. “Anthony Edward, for fuck’s sake. . .” he muttered half under his breath, then decisively changed the subject. “So where were you headed, when you broke down?”

No reason not to give the truth here, either. “Manitowoc, Wisconsin.”

Tony blinked, shaping the word soundlessly. His face was baffled and maybe slightly appalled. “Why?”

Pepper decided she was going to be amused by Tony. “Why not? Why anywhere? Why Spearfish, South Dakota?”

Tony waved that off, then pointed at her with the hand holding his fork. “I fit here, well enough at least. But _you_ have clearly left places like Manitowoc Wisconsin far behind you.”

Pepper took a long swallow from her wineglass. “No one ever really leaves their hometown behind.”

Jim broke in again. “Do you need to call anyone to let them know you’ve been delayed?”

Pepper smiled at him gratefully. “No, no one’s expecting me.” Then she decided to go on the offensive with Tony. “You may kind of fit here now, but there’s no way you’re from here. So how’d you get here, and where’d you come from?”

Tony waved her question away. “I teach at Black Hills State. You know, you shouldn’t tell complete strangers that no one would notice if you disappeared. I could be an axe murderer.”

Jim had his head in his hands, shoulders shaking slightly with what Pepper suspected was laughter. Pepper just smiled slowly. “I can take you. Your husband promised me a can of mace for just that purpose.”

Tony screwed his face up into a caricature of shocked affront, and he turned to punch Jim in the arm. “Traitor! Betrayal! I cannot believe I have been harboring a snake all these years. . .”

Jim lifted his head and pulled his face into solemn, earnest lines. “I’m sorry, Tony, but your habit is getting out of control. With the ground starting to freeze and all the softer patches in the garden already filled, I’m just not willing to bury another body until next May.”

Tony subsided into grumbling, mouth turned up at the corner, and the rest of the conversation over dinner was light and easy, the sort of inane pleasantries Pepper could engage in in her sleep.

Jim did the washing up and Pepper insisted on drying, so Tony disappeared back into the room he had been in when Pepper and Jim arrived, which looked like a workshop of some sort in the glimpse Pepper caught before he closed the door.

Once the kitchen was clean, Pepper made some vague motions towards being tired, and excused herself to shower and prepare for bed. When she got out of the bathroom, the first floor was dark, and she slipped into the spare bedroom grateful for the release from any further duties as guest.

On the bedside table, positioned directly under the pool of lamplight, was a brand-new can of mace, still in its packaging, with a note written in confident black lines: “Can’t make a liar out of my husband, can I?”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you are sensitive to depictions of accidental voyeurism and exhibitionism, check out the spoilery note at the end of the chapter.

Pepper rose early the next morning, woken after an unexpectedly deep and dreamless sleep by the sunlight pouring in through the south-facing windows. She dressed and padded out into the main part of the house, indulging her curiosity about her hosts by exploring the public rooms on their first floor.

The furniture was clearly chosen more for comfort than for style, mismatched and worn in. There was no art anywhere, though there really wouldn’t have been space for much given the way every single bit of wall was covered in bookcases. The books were wide-ranging, though there was a definite slant towards nonfiction in the hard sciences.

Pepper heard movement upstairs, so she drifted into the kitchen to get a pot of coffee started in the machine she had spotted the night before. While it was still percolating, Jim appeared wearing flannel pajama pants and a tank top. They watched the pot in companionable silence, though Pepper had to admit to herself that she was paying more attention to the line of Jim’s biceps out of the corner of her eye than she was to the coffee dripping.

Thudding footsteps interrupted their contemplation, and a few moments later Tony appeared as well. He was dressed identically to Jim, though Tony’s flannel was predominantly red rather than green, and his hair was sticking up in every direction. With his eyes half-closed, no longer dominating his face with their expressiveness, Pepper noticed the roughness of his skin, the deep lines on the sides of his mouth. The night before, distracted by his undeniably charming overbearingness, she would have guessed he was younger than she was; in the clear morning light she could tell he was older than that, probably near Jim’s age.

He walked straight into Jim’s chest, leaning his forehead against Jim’s shoulder, and then he closed his eyes again with a contented sigh.

The coffee maker beeped, and Jim reached out to grab three mugs while Pepper picked up the pot to pour. She opened her mouth to ask if either of them took milk or sugar, but they were both already sipping from their mugs, displaying a terrifying lack of care for the sensitive tissues of their tongues.

Pepper shook her head as she moved to the other side of the island to prop her elbows on the counter and blow on her own mug.

Once he had about half his mug in his system, Jim perked up a bit. “Can I get you something for breakfast? We’ve got eggs, and toast, and probably some bacon somewhere. . .”

“No thank you, not if it’s just for me. I’m not usually hungry this early.”

He nodded and made no move towards the fridge, so she assumed they weren’t in the habit of having elaborate breakfasts either.

Pepper waited until her coffee was almost gone, then broke the silence again. “So whenever it’s convenient, if you could tow me to whichever mechanic you like best in town, I’ll get out of your hair. . .”

Tony pushed himself off Jim’s chest at that, shaking himself into some semblance of wakefulness. “What are you talking about? I’m gonna take care of it.”

Pepper was at a loss. “That really isn’t necessary. . .”

But now Jim was looking at her earnestly. “No one in town is going to be open today – until Tuesday, actually, because of the holiday. If you’d really prefer to go to a mechanic, I can give Joe a call and I’m sure he’d be willing to take a look if you pay him extra, but Tony is just as good a mechanic as anyone around—“

“Better,” Tony interjected.

“—and even if you don’t trust him to do the actual repairs he can tell you what you’re going to need and how long it’s likely to take to get the parts.”

Pepper bit her lip against the desire to voice her knee-jerk no. All these years in L.A., she had gotten used to being able to do whatever she needed to do whenever she wanted to do it. She had forgotten how much narrower the options were in small towns, and Spearfish seemed to be an order of magnitude smaller than Manitowoc. Breathing through the need to just keep running, she summoned something approaching a smile.

“Thank you. I don’t know what I’d do without the two of you.”

They responded together, Jim’s “You’re welcome” and Tony’s “No problem” jumbling together in Pepper’s ear. Pepper drained the last of her coffee, then she moved to the sink to rinse out her mug and headed back to the bedroom.

* * *

Pepper spent the next hour and half twiddling her thumbs. She found a couple half-done crossword puzzles in the bedside table drawer and completed them, careful of the the paper, yellowed and months-old; she unpacked her suitcase enough to hang her blouses in the closet, then changed her mind about settling even that much into this borrowed bedroom and repacked everything again. She felt trapped, stalled, a feeling all out of proportion with the relatively minor delay she was facing. She didn’t want to inflict that nervous restlessness on the two men who had been so gracious to her, so she made herself stay in the bedroom and pace.

A rapid knock on the door interrupted her at last. She opened it to find Tony, changed into jeans and a tattered Black Sabbath t-shirt, wiping grease off his hands with a rag of indeterminate color.

“So I took a look at that sad imitation of Japanese engineering you’re doing your best to drive into the ground. Your alternator’s busted. You’ll need to replace it and the battery to get back on the road. Do you want me to do the work, or do you want Rhodey to tow you over to Joe’s place?”

Pepper wanted to bristle in defense of her car – they’d already been through a lot together, that formed a bond – but as her main criteria in selecting it was that the trade-in value from her not-terribly-new Mercedes would totally cover the cost, and it hadn’t even gotten her to the Wisconsin border, she decided it hadn’t earned her loyalty.

Instead, she grabbed her wallet. “Do you know how much the parts will cost?”

Tony pulled a tablet seemingly out of thin air. “Probably a hundred-twenty, hundred-fifty dollars?”

She pulled out five of her store of hundred dollar bills, not letting her wince show on her face. “Let me know if they cost more than you expect, or if the labor’s more than that covers.”

Tony glanced at the amount, then shook his head. “You don’t have to pay for my labor. . .”

Pepper pressed the cash into his chest. “Yes, I do.”

Tony plucked the money from her hand with two fingers, mouth twisted in a moue of distaste. “If you insist.” He folded it roughly and stuffed it in his pocket. “I won’t be able to get the parts until Tuesday, probably afternoon, but you’re welcome to this bedroom until then, and you should be back on the road by Wednesday morning.”

Well, fuck. “I really couldn’t impose. . .”

“Whatever. There’s nowhere else for you to stay, and this’ll still shave a day off the wait compared to going to Joe.”

It wasn’t the most gracious offer, but for all the flippance of the words Tony didn’t seem like he begrudged making it, and Pepper didn’t really have any other options. “All right. Thank you, again.”

“Yeah. Anyway, Rhodey’s heading into town to run some errands, wanted to know if you needed anything, or if you wanted to ride with.”

Well, it was a temporary escape, at least. “I’ll ride with.”

* * *

As she walked down Main Street, Pepper fretted. Small town etiquette demanded she do some service for her hosts as a thank you for inconveniencing them so much. But the traditional service would have been cooking a meal or two, at a minimum, and Pepper was a terrible cook. She had been planning on paying Jim and Tony the going rate for a hotel room and letting them think she was just a kind of clueless urbanite, but Tony’s reluctance to accept payment for fixing her car wasn’t making her eager to try forcing money on them again.

She wandered into a hole-in-the-wall liquor store while she was thinking, just to check out their wine selection. It was pretty standard, cheap bottles of mostly Californian wines, ridiculously overpriced; but tucked in at the end of the lowest shelf was a dusty bottle of Vin Santo. It was labeled “Riserva” and had a DOC sticker, so even though Pepper didn’t recognize the winery she felt confident it wouldn’t be terrible. It would be a start, at least, at a thank you.

Dessert wine called for dessert, so Pepper’s next stop was a bakery that had an encouraging line inside. When she met Jim half an hour later, she was in a good enough mood that she teasingly refused to let him peek at the blackberry and dark chocolate tart she had picked out.

Back at the house, Pepper helped Jim put together an easy lunch of sandwiches, then insisted on handling the clean-up by herself while Jim and Tony headed into the living room. When the kitchen was spotless, she spent a moment dithering, wondering if she should take herself back to the bedroom to stay out of her hosts’ way, but Jim spotted her in the doorway and waved her in. “Saturday afternoons are pretty quiet around here, but if you want to curl up with a book you’re welcome to borrow anything on our shelves.”

There was actually quite a bit to tempt her, but eventually she couldn’t resist their collection of Vonnegut, pulling down a battered copy of _The Sirens of Titan_. The inscription on the frontispiece, in handwriting that was the recognizable precursor to the handwriting on the note she received last night, said only “For my honeybear – XXX” and the date “3/6/88.” Pepper ran her fingers over the numbers, amazed. At least twenty years, these men had been together. They must have been barely out of college at the time. Pepper hadn’t even mastered walking in heels at that point, and they had already settled into the relationship that would presumably last the rest of their lives.

Pepper found the thought of that sort of constancy both incredibly attractive and simultaneously terrifying.

She snuck peeks at them over the edge of the book the rest of the afternoon. They had taken up positions on the opposite ends of the couch from each other, both working on paperwork of some sort. Jim had case files spread on the coffee table in front of him, and he was taking notes on a yellow legal pad; Tony was marking blue books in red sharpie, wearing chunky black reading glasses that rode the line between trendy and dorky but didn’t quite come down on one side or the other. As time passed, Jim stayed in his corner, shifting around a bit and occasionally leaning back to stretch out his back and roll his head on his neck. But Tony was all over his half of the couch, first sitting up straight, then sprawling with his legs apart, then curling into the arm, then twisting around to wedge his back into the corner. And each time he moved, he closed a little of the distance between his body and Jim’s.

Finally, as the daylight was beginning to fail, washing the room in gold autumn light, Jim reached over and grabbed Tony’s legs, pulling Tony’s feet onto his lap. Tony sighed contentedly and immediately pushed his feet down in between Jim’s legs, digging his toes under Jim’s far thigh.

Jim just laid his left hand heavily on Tony’s bare ankle, and the niggling little nervous tension seemed to bleed out of Tony, leaving him melted into the cushions.

Pepper’s chest was tight with. . . not quite jealousy. Envy, maybe, at least in part; but more just the feeling that this was something completely outside herself, something she could never have any part of, and it was beautiful.

Pepper had never been much of a fan of _Anne of Green Gables_ , mostly because she had been gifted the book on three separate occasions simply because she was a girl and had red hair; but there was a feeling Anne described, a “queer funny ache” at something exquisitely, painfully, beautiful. That was what Pepper was feeling now.

She was almost grateful when, a little bit later, Jim packed up his files and excused himself to start dinner.

“So you’ve never been married, then.”

Tony’s voice broke Pepper out of her reverie, and she flushed. She hated when her thoughts were so transparent. It made her shorter with Tony than his fairly neutral-sounding statement warranted.

“No.”

“Always put your career first?”

Pepper snorted bitterly. “Yeah.”

She braced herself for some probably well-meaning but ultimately patronizing advice – in her experience, men and married people both always felt the need to impart the secret of happiness when her single state came up – but to her surprise, Tony didn’t say anything more, turning back to his grading.

Paradoxically, his lack of judgment made Pepper want to defend her position. But given her precipitous exit from Los Angeles and the way she was still avoiding the front section of the newspaper and the nightly news shows, well, she didn’t have much of a leg to stand on. So she resolutely turned her attention back to the novel in front of her.

* * *

Dinner was quieter than the previous night’s; the subdued atmosphere from the afternoon continued to slow their conversation and drag out their silences. It was surprisingly comfortable, the sort of mellow companionship Pepper hadn’t felt since she last had a roommate, back in business school. There was a bit more chatter during dessert, as both men were distinctly appreciative of Pepper’s contribution, but even that simmered down quickly. And as she had the night before, Pepper excused herself fairly soon after the washing up was done, waving the book to indicate she would entertain herself the rest of the night.

When she reached the end Pepper poked her head out of the bedroom and, finding the first floor dark, she headed back down the hall to put the book back and grab another.

But she was stopped on the threshold of the living room by a hint of movement on the couch. As her eyes adjusted to the dark the movement resolved itself into two bodies entwined.

The one on top – Tony, it had to be Tony, Pepper could just make out the outline of his hair in the moonlight – pulled back to tear off his shirt, then fell back on Jim ravenously, kissing and sucking and, if Pepper was interpreting Jim’s quiet gasp correctly, even biting his lips and throat.

Jim was by no means a passive recipient of this attention. Pepper could just make out one hand buried in Tony’s hair, alternating pulling and stroking soothingly; the other hand slid down Tony’s bare back and under the waistband of Tony’s jeans. Pepper couldn’t see what Jim did then, but whatever it was caused Tony to moan a low “Fuck.”

And then Pepper realized she had no business standing there, watching them, and she crept back down the hall as quietly as she could.

On the other side of a too-thin door, Pepper pressed her hands against her hot cheeks and tried to regulate her breathing. She couldn’t stop herself from continuing to picture what must be happening just out of her sight: the flex of muscles in Tony’s back as he ground down against Jim; the line of Jim’s throat as he threw his head back in pleasure; the writhe of both their bodies as they sought that glorious friction. . .

Enough.

Pepper banged her head lightly against the door, sighing deeply, then flicked off the light and pulled the covers all the way up to her chin. She ignored the low throb of arousal between her legs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pepper accidentally catches Rhodey & Tony having sex in their living room after they think she's gone to bed; they don't know she caught them and even though she leaves the room quickly, she briefly fantasizes about what she saw.


	3. Chapter 3

Pepper was the last to rise the next morning, after a far more fitful sleep than the night before. She shambled out into the kitchen to find both Jim and Tony already dressed for the day: Tony in jeans (maybe the same ones – she was pretty sure the pair he had on yesterday had exactly that same grease stain on the right thigh) and an Iron Maiden t-shirt; Jim in his uniform.

Which fit him distractingly well, a thought Pepper suppressed almost before it had formed.

“It’s just going to be you and me around the house today, Pep,” Tony chirped as Pepper groggily poured herself some coffee. “So put in your musical requests now, or be prepared for a playlist made up exclusively of heavy metal dialed up to eleven.”

Jim watched Tony with a fond half-smile; Pepper was starting to think that was his perpetual expression where Tony was concerned. “He’s not kidding about that. If you have a strong objection to banshee wails and headbanging, you should register it now.”

That was far too much conversation for Pepper so early, and she just blinked at them.

Jim turned that fond half-smile on her. “Not a morning person either, eh? It’s understandable. I wouldn’t ever be up before nine if I could help it.”

“Unfortunately, he’s got to go out and bring home the bacon.” Tony had draped himself over Jim’s shoulders, and punctuated his statement with a smacking kiss on Jim’s cheek. Jim pushed his face away with an open hand, grinning.

“Yeah, gotta go police the mean streets of what passes for urban South Dakota. Keep an eye on this one for me while I’m gone, make sure he doesn’t blow himself up, would you?”

Pepper blinked again, slowly, wondering vaguely if she had skipped through time to a point when she had inside jokes with her hosts. She didn’t think she had entered a chrono-synclastic infundibulum, but Vonnegut was always kind of vague on the details of that phenomenon, so maybe. . .

Jim was laughing at her now, though he was kind enough to keep it confined to a twinkle in his eyes rather than vocalizing it. He grabbed Tony’s chin to tilt him into a lingering kiss. “I do have to go. Give me a call if you want me to pick up dinner, kay?”

Tony gave him one last quick peck, then pulled free. “You really think, with that offer on the table, that I’m gonna cook? Just give me a call when you’re done, and we’ll decide what we want to eat then.”

Jim shook his head wryly. “Lazy ass.” Then he reached out, hand hovering a moment a few inches away, and clasped Pepper’s upper arm briefly. “Have a good day.” And he was striding out the door.

Pepper felt off-balance, too slow for whatever Jim was trying to communicate to her. She turned her attention back to Tony, expecting to see that strange mix of goading and encouragement he had been turning on her since they met; instead he just looked fond too.

“Take your time waking up, use the house however you’d like. If you wanna go into town, you can borrow my car; if you wanna stick, around, you’re welcome to keep me company in the workshop.” And then he disappeared through the workshop door, leaving Pepper alone in her bemusement.

She did take her time waking up, curling up in the morning sun against the headboard of her borrowed bed and glancing through a collection of Vonnegut’s essays that she had never seen before. But she had already spent a lazy afternoon reading, and she just wasn’t built for that sort of idleness anymore. So soon enough she found herself pushing open the door to Tony’s workshop.

Her first thought was that the soundproofing had to be really expensive, because he did indeed have the music turned up “to eleven,” and she hadn’t heard it at all from the next room.

The workshop was obviously a modern addition, with its concrete floor and few small windows set high on the walls, though the windows were framed with a nod to the Craftsman style of the rest of the house. It was a fairly long room, dominated by a couple heavy wood workbenches that looked badly beaten and frequently scorched and scored. There were machine parts and circuit boards everywhere. 

The wall at the back of the house was dominated by a massive whiteboard covered in equations; the wall at the front of the house had a top-of-the-line flatscreen TV mounted on it. Tony was hunched over a laptop at a counter underneath the flatscreen, and as Pepper watched, he did something to throw whatever he was looking at on the laptop up on the television above him, then leaned back to type on the wireless keyboard on his lap.

A flash of movement drew Pepper’s attention, and suddenly all the miscellaneous parts resolved into robotics.

Pepper felt a headache coming on, one that had nothing to do with Ozzy screaming over the impressive sound system. Apparently S.I. was impossible to truly escape.

Tony took that moment to notice her presence, and he lit up. “Pepper! You decided to join me!” he shouted, and hurriedly turned down the music. Then his expression twisted comically into something that looked unsettlingly like horror. He practically fell off of his stool in his frantic rush towards her. “No, Dummy, don’t—“

Something metal prodded Pepper, poking the side of her head. She very slowly turned to see what it was.

The thing poking her backed away as she turned toward it, saving her from losing an eye. It appeared to be a three-fingered robotic arm on a rolling platform, not dissimilar to the machines used in automated factories the world over. But unless Tony was playing a very elaborate prank, no one was controlling it, and it was doing far more than executing simple programming. It had personality in every line of its body, the way it cocked its hand like a head, considering her, the way it backed away and then forward and then away again as if curious but unsure of her.

And, of course, there was Tony, pushing his way between Pepper and the robot, alternately admonishing – “Back up, back up, don’t crowd her, and be careful, can’t you see she’s barefoot?” – and apologizing – “He won’t hurt you, don’t worry, he’s just checking you out which, y’know, can’t fault his taste, can’t say I wouldn’t do the same if I could get away with it—“

“It’s an A.I.?”

Now Tony was looking at her with almost as much open curiosity as the robot. “Yeah.”

Pepper took a long look at Tony’s expression, at his body language. There was nothing about him of the proud inventor just waiting to show off his creation. Instead, he was positioned almost. . . protectively, over the hunk of metal and circuitry that, judging by the whine of the servos, could probably tear him limb from limb.

“Cool.”

And Pepper didn’t ask any questions about why an impossible feat of programming and engineering, and the presumably brilliant mind that created it, was languishing in nowhere, South Dakota.

Instead, she spent the next six hours working side by side with the robot, with DUM-E according to the nameplate on its side, though Tony refused to tell her if that was really an acronym. They were mainly relegated to handing Tony things, though at one point DUM-E had the exciting task of squeezing two components together while the bonding agent set, and at another point Pepper got to use her significantly more delicate fingers to dig out a dropped wire from a narrow (thankfully de-powered) socket.

It should have been both boring and insulting, but instead it was neither. Tony monologued most of the time, and Pepper only understood about a quarter of what he was saying, but his intense focus and understated joy in his task was fascinating to watch, and Pepper found the mindless tasks given to her soothing. She was also reminded, for the second time in her short acquaintance with Tony, of her father; of quiet weekend afternoons spent handing him tools as he did repairs around the house, her mother in the background humming off-key as she cooked up a fragrant vat of cheddar chowder. That quiet, companionable domesticity that Pepper had never recreated for herself in adulthood.

At one point, DUM-E trundled to the far side of the workshop and began manipulating a blender; when the bot returned it was carrying a pair of brilliantly green smoothies that it handed carefully first to Tony and then to Pepper. Tony gaped, muttering something Pepper only half-heard about Rhodey usually being the only other person to get that treatment, and Pepper thanked the bot gravely. The smoothie was surprisingly delicious, though Pepper was unable to identify what mix of fruits and vegetables had gone into making it.

When Jim returned, unheralded because Tony had apparently left his phone in the main part of the house out of earshot, he brought hot and sour soup instead of chowder, chow mein instead of bratwurst; but the way he kissed Tony hello held exactly the same casual affection that Pepper’s parents had always shared, that Pepper had watched grow between her college friends as they married and settled down with each other. Pepper’s chest ached again, and she busied herself with tidying the workbench and taking her leave of DUM-E.

“So I see you met Tony’s baby.” There was a caution in Jim’s eyes that Pepper hadn’t seen since he first came upon her on the side of the highway, and she took a moment to gather her thoughts, aware suddenly that Tony’s weren’t the only tests she had to pass to continue being accepted in this household.

“Dummy and I are becoming fast friends. I think by tomorrow he might trust me enough to let me take over for him on fire safety, at least when Tony isn’t actually using the blowtorch.”

Tony squawked a protest, but Pepper ignored it, too busy watching the pleased grin spread slowly across Jim’s face.

“That’s a pretty high honor. You must have impressed him, and Dummy is a very good judge of character.”

* * *

Pepper couldn’t quite manage to exile herself to the bedroom that evening. Instead, the three of them lingered at the dining table late into the night, surrounded by the remains of dinner and a growing collection of empty beer bottles.

At some point, Pepper’s curiosity got the better of her circumspection, and she had to ask about the two of them.

“Yeah, we’ve been together since college,” Jim answered readily enough.

“Since Rhodey was a fine upstanding Air Force ROTC cadet and I was the pimply nerd that somehow managed to seduce him, that is,” Tony interjected, with what Pepper was coming to see was uncharacteristic modesty.

Jim rolled his eyes. “We were roommates, and then we were more.”

The simplicity of the statement made Pepper catch her breath. She took a long swallow from her beer before going on. “And how long have you been married?”

Jim and Tony both laughed, but there was something off about it. Jim’s gaze grew distant, and Tony cut his husband a quick, worried glance, his smile taking on a forced edge. Jim answered first. “Well, that depends on which ceremony you’re going to count. . .”

“Personally,” Tony broke in, “I’m fondest of spring break, 1987 – Ivan was such a sweetheart, even after we stole her veil – but Rhodey’s always had a soft spot for Massachusetts in 2004 because he’s a sap and thought it brought us full circle or something.”

Jim was meticulously removing the label from the bottle in front of him. He didn’t look up as he said, “The one that mattered was the one in Vegas in 1990 – that’s the one that changed everything for us.”

But Tony was shaking his head. “No, that’s not true, that one didn’t change anything that really mattered. It just altered the circumstances around us – it didn’t make a damn bit of difference to what we were together by then.”

“I don’t know why you always say that,” Jim burst out. “You gave up—“

“Nothing that mattered.” Tony was implacable, hands flat on the table in front of him, mouth set in a firm line. Then he sighed, face falling into a weariness that made him look a decade older. “Not a fucking thing.”

Pepper had no idea how the conversation had ended up here. After a minute of casting about for a tactful change of subject, she ventured, “So you’re from Massachusetts?”

The tension drained out of both men, and Jim summoned up a wan smile. “Not quite. I’m from Pittsburgh, Tony’s from New York by way of California. But we met at MIT.”

“Undergrad?”

“Yeah.”

“You must have some stories. . .”

And then they were off on a happier track, exchanging reminiscences of prank wars and weekend-long benders staying up three days straight in the midst of finals. To Pepper, who had been an RA for two years at the University of Wisconsin, Tony sounded like a nightmare and Jim nearly as bad; but meeting them decades later and free of any responsibility to or for them gave Pepper the distance necessary to giggle at their shenanigans.

She finally went to bed with their voices still in her ears, her abs sore from laughing.

* * *

Monday morning dawned grey and windy, and Tony was the one staring blankly at the coffeepot when Pepper entered the kitchen. When she stepped up beside him to wait he turned to her abruptly.

“Look, Rhodey and I have to go into town today for the festivities. You can stay here if you want, but it’d be good if you came too. Distract him a bit.”

Air Force ROTC, right. He would have served at least four years. “I wouldn’t mind spending the day out.”

Tony turned back to the coffee. “Good. Just. . . don’t ask him about it, okay?”

“Of course,” Pepper agreed mildly, wondering what exactly she wasn’t asking about.

Jim didn’t join them for coffee; Tony and Pepper headed their separate ways to dress for the day and met back in the living room to wait for him.

Pepper expected Jim to come downstairs in dress blues, but when he appeared in a flurry of apologies – ‘Sorry, sorry, just can’t seem to get a move on this morning, I’m ready, let’s go—“ he was wearing the high-collared black coat and trousers that apparently made up Spearfish PD’s dress uniform. Her surprise must have shown on her face, because Tony was glaring at her. Jim was already out the door, however, so Pepper just scrunched her nose at him and gestured for him to precede her out the door.

Despite S.I.’s multitude of military contracts, Pepper had never been called on to attend a Veteran’s Day celebration before, so she wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. And Jim was apparently working, so he dropped her and Tony off at the City Park and then disappeared, making Tony’s request that she tag along to distract him seem moot.

Tony played tour guide for a little bit, and as the morning advanced and foot traffic picked up a bit he introduced Pepper to a bewildering number of people. Tony and Jim were clearly popular.

Around 10:30, they headed into the pavilion and found seats near the top of the metal bleachers. There was already a fairly decent crowd, and it took Pepper several minutes to spot Jim off at the edge of the platform, talking to a couple of officers in patrol uniforms. Since Tony had been so ominous earlier, Pepper watched him closely, and there was something. . . off, about him. There was a rigidity in his posture that she hadn’t seen before, and even from a distance the lines in his face seemed deeper than they were yesterday.

At eleven o’clock precisely, the ceremony got under way. It was essentially what Pepper would have predicted, if she had ever needed to predict a small town Veterans Day ceremony: a group of elementary school children sang the Star-Spangled Banner off-key; a pair of high schoolers gave earnest speeches about Freedom and The American Way; the mayor stumped self-importantly. The Color Guard was the highlight of the event, well-practiced movements mesmerizing; or at least, they were the highlight of what was put on officially.

Not three minutes into everything, while people were still getting seated around them, Tony slid down the bench right into Pepper’s space and threw an arm around her shoulder. He then leaned in very close and whispered in her ear: “You see the ginger kid on the end of the back row? That’s Alex Riley. Not even his parents know that he’s the kid who snuck in and peed in the City Council Chambers. Three times. I’d be impressed with that level of political protest in an eight year old, but I think it had less to do with the council’s decision to defund the after school program and more to do with the distance he has to walk home from school every day.” The rest of the ceremony went the same way. Tony apparently had vaguely scandalous gossip on everyone in town, and he had Pepper biting the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing aloud.

Jim was seated at the edge of the platform, next to the Chief and Assistant Chief of Police. He started out wearing that same worn-looking neutral expression Pepper had spotted earlier; but as the speeches got under way his eyes traveled over the crowd and soon found them. Pepper felt very conspicuous with Tony still draped over her, his goatee tickling her cheek.

But something in Jim perked up at the sight of them, and though Pepper would have sworn he didn’t even shift in his seat somehow the line of his body was looser, more open, after that.

Though he was otherwise the picture of attentive and professional, his eyes wandered to their spot in the stands every few minutes for the rest of the ceremony. And every single time he looked their direction Tony leaned back into Pepper’s space, touching her and making her shiver.

Well, except the one time during the mayor’s speech that he made a face and stuck out his tongue. Jim had started at that, flashing a glare quickly enough that Pepper almost would have thought she imagined it, if Tony hadn’t started shaking with silent laughter as a result.

Finally, the ceremony came to a close. There was much milling about, on the platform and in the stands, but slowly Pepper and Tony made their way down and Jim made his way out and they met in the middle to start heading back outside. Tony untangled himself from Pepper to link his arm with Jim’s, then reached up with his other hand to knock off Jim’s cap.

“C’mon, let’s go home.”

* * *

That night, they all got drunk.

There had been alcohol every night Pepper had been staying with Jim and Tony. But this time, as soon as they were through the door Tony was pouring three fingers of scotch and passing it to Jim for Jim to pound back.

There wasn’t much conversation that afternoon. Jim exchanged the uniform for a pair of sweat pants with MIT across the ass and a hoodie with enough machine oil on it that Pepper suspected it was Tony’s, then he plopped down in the middle of the couch and turned on a Star Trek marathon. After that first shot he sipped at his scotch, but Tony made sure the level in his glass never fell below an inch and from his boneless sprawl by dusk Pepper was pretty sure Jim was still making significant inroads into the bottle.

Tony was drinking scotch as well, but when he threw open his bar for Pepper’s perusal she requested and he made quite a serviceable sidecar for her. Then he disappeared into the kitchen, and when Pepper moved to follow he told her she should relax, kick her feet up, enjoy her downtime.

So she sat across from Jim in the armchair she was beginning to think of as “hers,” the silence thick between them. Tony flitted in and out, refilling their glasses, bringing snacks that neither of them touched, building a fire when the weak sunlight began to fade and the wind began to whistle through the eaves and batter the windowpanes. Eventually he produced a lasagna, bringing it out to the coffee table in its piping hot casserole dish and serving it up on paper plates “because I’m sure as hell not doing dishes tonight.”

Tony filled the silence admirably, debating with the characters on screen and heckling the technobabble invented by the science consultants around mouthfuls of pasta. He had opened a bottle of Barbera to pair with their dinner and Pepper gladly switched, already feeling closer to drunk than she had been in years, but Jim just shook his head at it and took another sip of his scotch.

After they had eaten all they were going to of the lasagna and Tony had taken the leftovers back to the kitchen, he came back in still arguing some arcane point about transporter technology and cradling another glass of wine. He sat back in his corner of the couch, but as soon as he was off his feet Jim reached out and grabbed him, pulling Tony into his chest and burying his nose in Tony’s hair. Tony melted against him, adjusting Jim’s arms so that his own were still free to gesticulate, but otherwise accepting the manhandling with grace. Pepper was reminded again of how much an outsider she was in this house, how little she was meant to witness their domesticity.

“I’m just gonna—“ She motioned vaguely hall-ward and took herself off to the bathroom, grateful the alcohol gave her a plausible excuse. Splashing her hot cheeks with cold water, she decided that she had clearly failed as a distraction from whatever baggage Jim had around Veteran’s Day, and so she would just go back to the living room to say her goodnights and then leave Tony to cheer Jim up however he felt best.

But the instant she was within Jim’s reach, before she had gotten a single word out of her throat, he had pulled her down onto the couch as well, practically into his lap.

“Don’t run away.” His voice was soft, a little hoarse from the liquor and disuse.

Pepper stared at Tony, wide-eyed; the glance she got of the naked pleading in Jim’s eyes was too much to take. Tony just looked expectantly back, waiting on her decision and clearly reserving judgment until she made it.

“You’re really pretty,” Jim whispered against the side of Pepper’s head, and she gave in. Silently asked herself “Well hell, why not?” and came up with no satisfactory answer, so she just rearranged herself for maximum comfort up against Jim’s side and stole his glass of scotch from him. Tony clinked his glass against hers and they both took long gulps.

Having them both in his arms seemed to loosen something in Jim, and though they were spaced oddly and bore little relation to what was happening on the television, he started making comments to them.

“I hate uniforms. Some piece always itches.”

“My grandpa always drank scotch. After. . . after, Grandma Ruth started cutting it with water, and absolutely refused to do the twist of orange when she made it for him.”

“When I was little I used to get carsick all the time. Can’t stand saltines, they taste like vomit now.”

“Ma Spellman was giving you two the evil eye up in the stands today. Haven’t seen her that incensed since we first moved to town. Guess she really does like me now.”

“Tony’s got these funny little dimples on his back, low down and right next to the spine. Wonder if you’ve got anything like that?”

That last was said very earnestly into Pepper’s cheek, and she couldn’t help tensing up at it. Jim immediately pulled back, blinking rapidly in an effort to wake himself up.

“Sorry, sorry. Not polite, I know. Can’t say things like that while you can’t run away.”

Which. . . wasn’t the issue Pepper was worried about, she realized as her startled gaze flicked between the two men. Jim was swaying slightly in his seat, obviously still only holding onto consciousness by a thread. Tony, meanwhile, was wearing a cautious, canny expression that was far more knowing than Pepper expected, and bore no trace of censure or hurt.

Pepper opened and shut her mouth several times, trying to work out whether that was an actual come-on and, if it was, what she wanted to say to it. Finally she settled on “I have freckles in the exact pattern of the constellation Columba on my right shoulder.”

Jim smiled delightedly and pulled her back down next to him again. “That’s amazing,” he mumbled, and nuzzled into the shoulder in question.

Tony, meanwhile, snorted. “I want to know who spent so long tracing patterns on your back. I’m sure there were better things they could have been doing with that time. . .”

Pepper’s heart was racing, and she wished the alcohol weren’t all on the Tony’s side of the coffee table. Her giggle was maybe a little hysterical. “Well, he was an astrophysics major, so stargazing was very much in his wheelhouse. And we were both pretty high at the time. . .”

By the time Pepper had finished explaining that she and Shaffiq had never actually had sex and she’d actually been more into his girlfriend Devi, not that she had realized that at the time, Tony was laughing at her and Jim had fallen asleep.

Tony turned off the television, which had switched to an infomercial without any of them noticing. He kept his eyes firmly on the screen even after it went dark, however.

“Every Halloween I’ve ever seen pictures from, Rhodey was dressed as a soldier. At least three different years he went in some variation on a flight suit. He did ROTC, aimed at and got into MIT so he could study Aerospace Engineering. He was gonna be a fighter pilot. And then he met me, and when he should have been getting ready to contract with the Air Force going into his junior year, he was instead told in no uncertain terms that he wasn’t ever going to rise above first lieutenant, and that if he did pursue the Air Force anyway, all he had to look forward to was an other-than-honorable discharge.”

Tony drained the last of his wine and looked longingly at the bottle on the table, but only sighed and put the glass down. “He gave up the sky for me. So once a year, when everyone pulls out their badly fitting uniforms and drones on about the glory of military service, I do my best to keep him distracted and then I get him drunk and pour him into bed.” He stroked the top of Jim’s head absent-mindedly.

“Well, and usually there’s at least a blowjob somewhere in there, but that seemed rude with a guest in the house.”

Pepper huffed a laugh, tempted to cry hypocrite but unwilling to let Tony know she had caught them on the couch. Jim shifted at the shake in her shoulder, sliding down just enough to start to snore.

The unwonted solemnity fell off Tony’s face in an eyeblink, replaced with that startling, warming grin. “That signals that it’s time to transition into Phase Three of Operation: Get Rhodey Through Veteran’s Day. Want to help me get him upstairs?”

The stairs were far too narrow for three abreast. Pepper went up first, one of Jim’s arms slung over her shoulders, while Tony pushed from behind. Jim never opened his eyes, but did manage to rouse enough to keep his feet pointed in the right direction. At the top of the stairs they took a sharp turn left, stumbled down an equally narrow hall with another jog left, then at Tony’s direction Pepper pushed open the second of the two doors to find their bedroom.

It was only a few more steps to the bed and then Pepper gladly let Jim’s deadweight fall to the mattress. She watched Tony get Jim a little better settled, head up on the pillow and body curled under the covers, then realized that was her cue to go.

She cleared her throat quietly to get his attention. “Good night, Tony.”

He opened his mouth to say something, then closed it again, shaking himself a little. “Yeah. Good night, Ms. Potts. Sleep well.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, _technically,_ Veteran's Day fell on a Tuesday in 2008. But if I had used that, Pepper wouldn't have been stuck in Spearfish for the long weekend, so we're going to pretend that 2008 wasn't a leap year for the purposes of this fic. :)


	4. Chapter 4

Her last day in Jim and Tony’s house didn’t dawn so much as grow gradually light enough to make vague shapes out against the sleeting rain.

Pepper found the kitchen empty but the coffee already made, so she helped herself to a mug and began internally feeling out the extent of her hangover.

She had tentatively diagnosed it as “not that bad” when her eye lit on the note left for her. Since it was in plain sight on the counter directly next to the coffee maker, she decided to downgrade the hangover to “actually kind of bad, but not terrible.”

Tony’s handwriting again. “Went to town for some stuff. Jim’ll sleep til noon. Be as loud as you want – he’s hilarious when he’s hungover.”

Pepper couldn’t quite bring herself to be that cruel, so she was reading yet again when Jim finally made his tentative way downstairs. He was a very interesting shade of grey, one that took a greenish cast when Pepper offered him coffee. He grabbed a slice of bread, toasted it lightly, and settled very carefully down on the couch to nibble on it with his eyes closed.

The toast seemed to settle his stomach a bit, and when it was finished he opened his eyes enough to focus on Pepper.

“Where’s Tony?”

“He left a note saying he had to head into town.” Pepper fiddled with the book, wondering if she should put it down or keep it open as an excuse not to have conversation.

“Right, Tuesday, PHYS 292.” He sat mulling that for a minute and Pepper had just turned back to her book when he spoke again. “What time’s it?”

The clock was actually more in Jim’s line of sight than Pepper’s, leading Pepper to believe he still wasn’t as awake as he looked. “Almost one.”

Jim sighed, settling back into the cushions. “He won’t be back for another hour then. Later, if the parts shipment doesn’t come in on time.”

He blinked a few more times, then pushed himself back upright, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees, eyes suddenly alert and. . . contrite?

“I’m sorry. For everything about yesterday, but especially for last night. It was entirely inappropriate.”

Were Jim and Tony not fully in agreement then? Pepper wondered. The night before she had been fairly certain that things were on hold, but now Jim seemed to be walking them back. It was probably smarter to let him.

But Pepper was tired of smart decisions, and she very selfishly didn’t want anything walked back. “It wasn’t unwelcome.”

And Jim looked so honestly surprised that Pepper had to wonder whether he was maybe still not quite sober. “Oh.” He swallowed, then smiled tentatively at her. “All right.”

The sat in pleased and slightly baffled silence a while longer, then Jim pushed himself up to his feet. “I should get something going for lunch, probably,” and Pepper took that as her cue to put the book down and help.

So when Tony bustled in at a quarter past two shedding soaking outer layers and shaking his wet hair out of his eyes, he found Jim showing Pepper how to properly dice an onion so that they’d have nice even pieces to sprinkle over their canned chili.

“Still don’t believe in umbrellas, eh?”

Tony shook his hair deliberately in Jim’s direction, splattering him with droplets. “Umbrellas are for the weak.”

Pepper rolled her eyes. “Umbrellas are for people who don’t want head colds.” Then she grabbed the dish towel off Jim’s shoulder and tossed it onto Tony’s head, muffling his irate splutter. “Dry off like a human being, not a puppy.”

Jim was obviously delighted to have someone else gang up on Tony with him, and he pushed Tony back out of the kitchen with relish. “You’re mopping up that trail you just left in the hallway!” he called at Tony’s back as it retreated upstairs to change.

When Tony came back down, they had the cornbread muffins out of the oven and cooling, and three bowls of chili ready to be doctored with a nice selection of toppings. (No tortilla chips though, to Pepper’s mild dismay.)

They all took their bowls into the living room, and after only a moment’s hesitation Pepper sat down on the couch so that she and Tony were flanking Jim again. Both men smiled at her decision, and Jim elbowed her companionably before tucking in to his food.

Pepper insisted on cleaning up after lunch. Jim headed back upstairs, where he apparently had an office, to work without distraction; Tony disappeared out the back door. After everything was spotless again – Pepper didn’t think she had done this many dishes since Jessica came to visit three years ago and they had refused to leave the condo the whole week – Pepper rifled through the hall closet to find a heavy poncho and ran splashing through the yard to the garage she could just see at the end of the gravel drive.

Tony had Pepper’s little Hyundai up on a couple ramps with the hood propped open, and he was already elbow deep in the engine, so she just stood dripping in the doorway, watching him. He must not have heard her run across the gravel, though, because when he caught a glimpse of her out of the corner of his eye he startled, banging his head on the hood and cursing a blue streak.

Pepper didn’t laugh. Much.

Then he put her to work handing him tools as he needed them, putting aside parts as he dismantled them, and it was just like the afternoon she spent with him and DUM-E in the workshop, only chillier. It was surprisingly quick work replacing the alternator and the battery, and then the engine was purring again, better than ever.

Tony did a visual check on her brake pads and her windshield wipers, probably thinking of the rain forecasted off and on for the rest of the week, but eventually he proclaimed her car road-worthy. It felt final, slamming the hood shut and turning off the car. Pepper was free to get back on the road, free to keep running as far from California as she could get, even if it meant going home.

Wow, that was a shitty plan. But it was what she had.

The run back to the house was a little more precarious; the light was fading fast, and it hadn’t occurred to Pepper to leave the kitchen light on as a beacon. Tony grabbed her hand and Pepper was grateful for it.

She was quiet as they made dinner, and Tony respected that quiet, muttering to himself about everything under the sun but only talking to her directly to give her directions as she helped him prepare a roast. He sent her upstairs to call Jim for dinner, and Jim looked grateful for the interruption, bent over the desk rubbing his temple with one hand, the only light in the room the small pool cast by his desk lamp.

It was Jim who finally broached the subject, after the usual digging-in-and-compliments-to-the-chef stage of the meal.

“So your car’s back up and running?”

“Yeah, Tony says it looks good to go.”

“Happy to be getting back on the road?”

Ha. The $64,000 question. “Happy that I no longer have to impose so egregiously on your kindness.”

Tony tapped his fork against his plate agitatedly. “Technically, you didn’t have to impose last night – Family Weekend didn’t extend into Veteran’s Day, there were probably rooms available in town. Actually, there definitely would have been last night, and there might have been the night before, even.”

Pepper slowly put her own fork down rather. She didn’t know where this Tony had come from, the Tony of that first night, all temper and attack doing little to distract from his obvious defensiveness.

Except this Tony was actually unfiltered, didn’t politely avoid the things Pepper wasn’t saying. No, he charged right at them like she was waving a red flag in front of a bull.

“Why are you in such a hurry to go though? You say you’re going home but that nobody’s waiting there for you. It isn’t a work trip or you’d be more stressed about being delayed, and nobody with any sense just up and decides to _vacation_ in small-town Wisconsin. Which sounds a hell of a lot more like you’re running away from something than towards it. So what’s the rush? What could possibly be the draw—“

“Tony! Enough!” Jim’s voice was a whipcrack, cutting through Tony’s resentful babble and Pepper’s frozen startlement. He turned to her, hand outstretched but not quite touching. “Pepper, I’m sorry, that was inexcusable. . .”

She waved him off, eyes never leaving Tony’s. “You’re right. I am running away, and I picked Manitowoc just to have a destination. There’s nothing for me there now, but there’s nothing for me anywhere else either. So why not go home, where at least I know that they set up a sobriety checkpoint on Third Street every Friday night, and I can head down to the high school and find my old principal when I need to hear someone say my name.”

And Tony slumped, turning his own hands palm-up on the table. “Then stay here. There’s no checkpoint, but I can show you where the speed trap is; and I can certainly give up Ms. Potts for Pepper if you’d like. Hell, I’ll even call you by whatever relic of the Victorian age your parents must’ve saddled you with that made Pepper preferable. Just give us a little more time.”

In the sudden hush, Pepper thought they must all three be holding their breath. There was only one possible answer, really.

“Okay.”

And Jim laughed, rich and long and kind of baffled. She thought he muttered “Fucking crazy son of a bitch, will never understand how that works. . .” as he shook his head, and then he settled back into eating.

A moment later, Pepper and Tony joined him.


	5. Chapter 5

The day after Pepper’s last day in Jim and Tony’s house dawned. . . well, it dawned grey and rainy again, which offended Pepper’s sense that she was turning over a new leaf and the weather should do the same. But it _was_ in keeping with the forecast from the previous day, so Pepper had to grant it consistency and follow-through, at least.

She woke in her bedroom, exactly as she had the last four mornings, except that the previous night she had gone ahead and hung her clothes in the closet rather than leaving them folded in her suitcase. She stretched and yawned like a cat, luxuriating in a leisurely wake-up. Tony and Jim both had work this morning, so she would have the house to herself until sometime mid-afternoon.

The night before they hadn’t seemed to want to let her out of their sight, and as the feeling was mutual, all three of them crowded the kitchen for clean-up and then crowded the sofa for a few hours of vegging in front of the television. Apparently Jim was a basketball fan; he had missed the Sunday game, but now he insisted on subjecting them to a truly awful Minnesota Timberwolves game. In and around mocking Jim for losing Kevin Garnett to Boston, where Tony kept his sports loyalties, Tony prodded Pepper through a slightly-barbed Q&A session.

In a return to his former tact, he didn’t ask any questions about what she was running from; as a result, she found herself answering most his not-terribly-polite questions.

Yes, her parents were dead; no she had no siblings or other close family; yes, the few friends she was still in touch with from high school had scattered to Chicago or the coasts. No, she didn’t have any plans for where she was going to stay when she got to Manitowoc. Probably just find a motel on the outskirts, where it was cheap and not too seedy.

She volunteered that her parents’ household had had divided sports loyalties too: her father was a die-hard Red Wings fan, and her mother rooted for the Blackhawks. She herself had always maintained an aggressive agnosticism in the face of sports rivalries, though it was expedient to at least keep up with the Lakers and Dodgers, living in L.A. (The Kings mattered less, politically, but Pepper kept up with them because her parents would have been horrified that she no longer watched hockey.)

Jim just looked baffled that she actually cared enough that she could name multiple hockey teams.

And so the night went, the three of them feeling out a new balance, now that Pepper was there by choice rather than necessity. And now Pepper was alone in their house for the first time, and it already felt more comfortable than it had any right feeling.

She spent some time exploring it more in earnest than she had that first morning, when she kept herself confined to the public areas. She headed upstairs, got a better look at the bedroom in the daylight, poked through the bookshelves in Jim’s office to discover they had a definite law enforcement bent, found the washer and dryer tucked into a closet.

She made use of those facilities – she had been wearing the same pair of jeans for three days, and had had to wash her underwear in the bathroom sink the night before, so she was past desperate.   
Heading back downstairs, she hesitated a moment, then pushed into Tony’s workshop. DUM-E was backed into his charging station, but when Pepper turned on the light he wheeled himself out to greet her.

The sound of her own voice was startling, and she realized she hadn’t said a word yet that morning. It made her stumble over her words a little. “Well, um, looks like I’m sticking around for a bit. You don’t mind, right?”

DUM-E pulled his claw out from under her stroking fingers and cocked it at her. Then he extended it oh-so-gently to pet her back. Approval.

Pepper had no desire to mess with anything Tony was working on, and she trusted that DUM-E would warn her away if she got too close to something sensitive. But she could certainly do a bit of tidying, gathering bits of empty plastic bags and burnt-out wiring into the trash can, picking up dirty mugs and the occasional plate with sandwich crusts on it to take back to the kitchen. She talked to DUM-E as she worked, and after a bit of contemplation DUM-E began to help, pulling the cabinets out from the wall so Pepper could sweep behind them, pointing out where a mug had been broken and Tony had simply swept the pieces under his desk.

And so Pepper spent another quiet, domestic day. She made herself lunch, flipping the newspaper left out on the counter for her over so that all she could see were the local headlines; she found the vacuum and did the first floor; she finished her laundry and got it all tucked away neatly in her bedroom.

Tony came home sometime after four and made her his sous chef again, this time using the leftover roast in a hash. Jim was home by six and they sat down around the dining table and had the “How was your day, dear?” conversation that, frankly, Pepper had thought hadn’t happened in the real world for at least twenty years.

She spent most of the dinner staring at the bouquet of roses that Jim had brought home. For her.

Eventually, Tony kicked her under the table. She looked up to discover that they were done eating, and Jim was washing the dishes in the kitchen.

“Too much?”

“No?” Well that didn’t come out at all reassuringly. . .

Tony chuckled at her, then stood up and pulled her to her feet. He didn’t step back as he did so, so she was standing right up against his chest. They were practically the same height, and Pepper was barefoot while Tony was still in his shoes.

His eyes were very dark, framed by crow’s feet from his fading smile. Pepper was so busy watching them that she didn’t notice him closing the little distance between their bodies until his lips met hers.

They were a little chapped, and his goatee tickled, prompting Pepper to realize in surprise that she had never actually kissed someone with facial hair before. Her eyes stayed open longer than was probably polite, brain seemingly three seconds behind what was happening.

Tony just smiled against her lips and kissed her again. This time Pepper got with the program, closing her eyes, opening her lips just a little, winding her arms around Tony’s waist. She flicked her tongue out teasingly and Tony met her, dropping his hands to her hips and pulling her even closer.

There was a cough from behind her, and Pepper jumped back to find Jim watching them from where he was leaning against the doorway, arms crossed in front of his chest. He had his lips quirked in a half-smile that widened considerably at Pepper’s startlement. “Oh, I didn’t want to interrupt. I just figured I should let you know you had an audience. Please, continue.”

Tony flipped Jim off. “Always interrupting my fun with totally unnecessary commentary,” he grumbled, then pulled Pepper back in towards him and began laying delicate kisses against her jaw and throat.

But Pepper couldn’t forget Jim was standing there now, and she pushed Tony back. “Maybe a change in venue?”

Tony shot Jim another glare, then gave Pepper a rueful smile. “All right.” He grabbed one of her hands and started leading her into the living room. Pepper let herself be tugged along, and Jim jogged a couple steps to catch up with them, taking Pepper’s other hand and raising it to his lips to kiss.

“Really?” Tony asked rhetorically. “This is your seduction game, Rhodes?”

“Feeling jealous?” Jim asked, then grabbed Tony’s hand to kiss it as well. Pepper giggled, and let the men push her down onto the couch and take up flanking positions.

“My turn,” was all the warning Pepper got, and then Jim was pulling her into their first real kiss. This was no light tease, more affection than heat; this was Jim using his large hands to hold Pepper’s face exactly where he wanted and plundering her mouth, sucking her lower lip between his and then thrusting his tongue inside to tangle with hers. It was a heady kiss, one that set Pepper alight down in her gut and just a tad lower.

“Okay, enough, my turn again,” and Tony was turning her back to him and pulling her into another deep kiss.

“So greedy,” Jim murmured in her ear as he pulled her hair to the side to kiss the nape of her neck.

They passed her back and forth like that for ages, until her lips were raw and her skin was buzzing with arousal. By unspoken agreement no one made any move to undress, and everyone’s hands had stayed above the waist. At one point Pepper had gotten her arm stuck behind Tony’s head as Jim tried to turn her again, causing all three to dissolve in breathless laughter; at another point Jim’s watch had gotten tangled in her hair and Tony had to gently pull them free.

It all made Pepper feel about fifteen, giddy and unsure and unbearably turned on but with no real urge to do something about it.

It was Jim who finally started pulling back, hands shifting from hungry to soothing, mouth slowly, in fits and starts, disengaging.

“I’m sorry to say I have an early morning tomorrow so I, at least, should head up to bed.”

Tony groaned and pulled his hand up from where he was tickling Pepper’s ribcage to rub his face. “Yeah, Kim moved the department meeting to 7am, just to be sadistic. I should head up too.”

They both scattered to make sure the back of the house was closed up, leaving Pepper to check the lock on the front door and turn off the living room lights. They met back at the bottom of the staircase and each man kissed Pepper goodnight, and then Pepper wandered into the last lit room on the first floor and threw herself back onto the bed in a daze.

* * *

That set the pattern for the rest of the week. Pepper had the days to herself, to putter around their house doing chores and catch up on her reading in the armchair that was beginning to reshape itself around her. And in the evening they would all three tangle on the couch to make out.

It was Tony who first took something off. Something on Thursday required him to dress up, and while he loosened the tie and shed the loafers before dinner, it was the kissing on the couch that prompted him to pull his belt free from its loops and unbutton and untuck his shirt. But it was Pepper who first introduced lower body contact when, frustrated at getting a crick in her neck from the constant back and forth, she muttered “Fuck this” and swung her leg over Jim’s lap to straddle him. Her on top of somebody’s lap was clearly the superior position; it brought both of them within easy reach for her, and made it much easier for them to kiss each other too.

It was always Jim who called a halt to the proceedings as it started to get late, however. It made sense – from what Jim had said previously, Pepper gathered that Tony routinely kept irregular hours; and Pepper had no plans and nowhere to be. But Jim was expected to report to the station at 8 o’clock on the dot, so when their evenings stretched into the night he pulled back.

He was more and more reluctant each night, though, and Pepper took some pride in that.

Pepper assumed that at least some of the nights Tony and Jim went upstairs and finished each other off. She had acquired plenty of evidence that their makeout sessions aroused them; by Friday night she was even doing a little grinding from her perch on their laps, to moans of satisfaction all around. But for her part, she was relishing the build-up, lay in her borrowed bed just feeling the flush of heat travel across her skin, the sweet throb between her legs. She loved that they had never yet pushed her for more.

She wondered what the people in town thought she was doing here. She drove herself in Thursday morning to do some shopping and was greeted by quite a few people, presumably members of the parade of faces Tony had introduced her to on Monday but which she had seen no reason to commit to memory. They were, by and large, a nosy bunch; Pepper had grown too accustomed to L.A., where every interaction operated on the unspoken assumption that you would never encounter the other person again, to feel comfortable with how free everyone felt to ask her where she was from and how long she was staying and where she was headed after she left.

She met Joe the mechanic and Margie the travel agent; both expressed considerable surprise at her continued presence in town. Thankfully neither pressed for a reason why, but with Margie especially Pepper could see the wheels turning.

Whatever conclusions she came to, Margie didn’t seem to dislike them; she insisted Pepper follow her home so that she could give her a couple loaves of zucchini bread that she said Tony and Jim would go wild for, and that she just couldn’t manage to stuff into her own overstocked freezer.

Thursday was another of Tony’s short days, so he came home while Pepper was still putting everything away. He did, in fact, go crazy over the zucchini bread, slicing into one loaf immediately and breaking off a chunk and lifting it to Pepper’s lips. It was delicious, and when Pepper tried to steal another bite from his slice he fought her off, told her to get her own.

After they had eaten a third of the loaf, Tony reluctantly wrapped it back up. “Oh, hey, I got you something too.” He ambled back into the hall to grab his bag, then proudly pulled out a stuffed teddy bear, apparently left over from some Fourth of July festivities given its red white and blue top hat and vest and miniature flag.

Pepper stared at it blankly. “Thank you?”

Tony pressed it into her hands. “See? Rhodey’s not the only romantic one. . .” Then he took himself off to his workshop, leaving Pepper still staring at the bear.

She really had no idea whether he meant the gift seriously or as a gag.

* * *

Saturday, Pepper broke down. It wouldn’t have happened if the day had gone as she had tentatively planned – she knew Jim had to work, but figured Tony would be home and she could hang out in the workshop with him, or on the couch with him while he graded problem sets, or in the garage with him while he did the oil change and tune-up he had mentioned that Jim’s truck needed.

But instead, Pepper woke up to find a note from Tony saying that one of his research assistants needed his help at the lab and she shouldn’t expect him back until dinner time. Which meant she had another six or seven hours to rattle around the house by herself.

Everything reasonable was already clean, and Pepper had no desire to scrub the grout or wash the windows or clear out the fridge. She was too restless to spend the day reading, and she had already done downtown Spearfish, such as it was, twice.

She went for a jog despite the watery sunlight’s inability to raise the temperature over forty. She spent far longer on the stretching part of her cool down than was warranted. She tried to meditate, then when that didn’t work she remembered the punching bag she had seen in the garage and went out to attack it for a while.

She flipped through the dusty cookbooks on the shelf in the kitchen and picked a recipe out for dinner purely because it had a lot of steps. But even making a shopping list, picking up the ingredients she needed, starting the prep, realizing the capers in the fridge were long past their best by date, going back to town to pick up a new bottle, finishing the prep, and getting the food in the oven still left Pepper with a minimum of an hour and a half before she could expect Jim or Tony back.

She knew it was a terrible idea, but she nonetheless found herself in front of Tony’s computer, bringing up the New York Times website.

The top story was about the protests over Proposition 8’s passage, and though that meant more to her now than it did two weeks ago, before she had Tony’s casual rattling off of his and Jim’s various not-legally-recognized marriages in her head, it was also something of a relief. But her relief was short-lived, because when she clicked ‘refresh’ the top story changed to an op-ed piece destined for the Sunday print edition calling for a congressional hearing into S.I.’s illegal arms dealing.

It very helpfully provided a timeline of the developing scandal, with links.

There had been another wave of arrests at Stane Industries after Pepper left. Stane himself was judged a flight risk, thankfully, and denied bail.

And though Christine had faithfully kept Pepper’s name out of things, someone had put two and two together, the disappearance of Obadiah Stane’s personal assistant just hours before a whistleblower leaked information of his illegal arms deals simultaneously to Homeland Security and the press, and plastered Pepper’s face all over the less rigorously fact-checked news sites.

Pepper pushed the laptop away, heart pounding. DUM-E heard the clatter and came over to investigate, gently pushing the laptop back towards her after considering the situation for a moment. Pepper tried out a laugh, stopping as soon as it came out choked.

Then she very thoroughly cleared the browser history, and went back to the kitchen. Scrubbing the grout was looking more and more appealing.

* * *

Pepper pushed things on the couch that night, grinding down into Tony’s lap until he was bucking up against her, teasing and sucking at Jim’s lips until he was writhing. She didn’t notice that Tony’s grip on her hips had shifted from helping her to hindering her ride until it turned bruising.

“Pep – Pep – Pepper—“

Pepper pulled back, shirtless chest rising and falling rapidly in a way that Jim obviously liked, because he leaned in to press a series of kisses down her sternum and into her cleavage. “What? What’s wrong?”

Tony rubbed a hand over his face, mouth quirking wryly. “Nothing’s wrong, but if you don’t slow down a little I’m gonna have a bit of a mess on my hands.”

“In your pants,” Jim murmured against Pepper’s skin, eliciting a chuckle.

Pepper waited until Tony met her eyes again, then squirmed on top of him very deliberately. “I can work with that. Or you two can invite me upstairs.”

Both men stopped and stared at that. Jim was the one who spoke, eyes solemn. “You sure?”

Pepper rolled her eyes, thrown by the shift in mood. “I kind of thought that’s where we were heading here. . .”

Jim untangled a bit and rubbed the back of his neck, face a quarter-turned away. “Well, yeah, but. . .”

Tony set his jaw, watching Jim’s face closely. Pepper really had not anticipated her offer being met with this much consternation. Still, when she was about to take it back, Tony gave a little decisive nod and said, “No buts, just yes. Absolutely yes.” He smacked Pepper’s ass lightly and started to push her to her feet. “Let’s go.”

Pepper led the way upstairs, men following close. Tony crowded up against her back, palm warm against her waist; Jim trailed behind him, his hand tugging at hers as they moved down the hall. In the bedroom, when Tony stepped away to turn on the light, Jim reeled Pepper in and pressed her gently against the wall, kissing her deeply. When he pulled back and Pepper could catch her breath again, she found that Tony had stripped down to just his pants, and his hands were busy working on the buttons of Jim’s flannel shirt.

He caught her eye over Jim’s shoulder. “Feel free to help out here, Pep.”

So Pepper started unbuttoning Jim as well, from the bottom up, even as she pulled him back in to another kiss. When her fingers met Tony’s in the middle she broke away from the kiss so she could slant him a grin, then left him to pull the shirt off while her hands fell to Jim’s fly.

Jim let her get the top button undone and then stopped her effectively by hoisting her up against the wall. “Not so fast. I don’t really relish the idea of trying to do this with my pants ‘round my ankles.” And as soon as Pepper had her legs wrapped around his waist he spun her and carried her the four steps to the bed.

He lay her down on the bedspread gently, one hand under her thigh, the other firm support in the center of her back. When he pulled away to finish taking off his pants Pepper discovered that the hand at her back had been busy – without her noticing, he had unclasped her bra and pulled it with him to toss onto the chair in the corner.

Tony was grinning. “He is very good with his hands, isn’t he?” Then he bent down to continue Jim’s work, shucking Pepper out of her jeans deftly enough that Pepper suspected him of making a case for the cleverness of his own fingers.

Pepper lifted her hips to let Tony slide her jeans down, then grabbed him by the waistband and pulled him down on top of her. He was still very hard, and he pressed himself down into Pepper and began to move his hips in little hitching thrusts, burying a groan in her hair.

Pepper could feel the roughness of the denim through the thin cotton of her panties and she did a little grinding and moaning of her own at the friction. Then Tony shimmied down a little to begin lavishing attention on her breasts, and Jim took the opportunity to kneel on the bed behind him and work Tony’s pants open and down to his knees. Tony kicked them the rest of the way off without removing his mouth from Pepper’s chest.

Jim stretched out next to Pepper and began kissing her again, bringing a hand up to tease the breast Tony wasn’t occupied with.

It felt fantastic – Pepper hadn’t had sex in months, hadn’t even been much in the mood to masturbate since the end of summer, and she had never had sex with a man (much less two) who was so willing to indulge in foreplay. But Tony and Jim still seemed content to stay at that level, just more making out, albeit slightly more naked and prone rather than upright, and Pepper needed more than that tonight.

So after a few more minutes she took matters into her own hands, pushing Tony off her to flip him onto his back, then pulling down his underwear to free his erection.

They all froze for a moment. Tony blinked up at her, then said blankly: “Oh. I guess we’re naked now.”

Pepper laughed, and that felt even better than the making out had. “Not quite yet. Jim’s gotta get with the program here too.” And then she wriggled out of her panties to set a good example.

She was about to get her first taste of Tony’s cock when she realized: the condoms she had bought in town, trying not to imagine what rumors the clerk at the drugstore was going to spread, were downstairs in _her_ bedroom.

Pepper veered away from her initial target, kissing Tony’s hip bone while she wondered how to excuse herself to grab them while still maintaining their forward momentum.

She caught motion out of the corner of her eye, and then Jim was there, grinning lopsidedly at her, with a foil packet in his hand.

“I grabbed a handful of these last time I took somebody to the clinic. There are flavored ones in the drawer if you’d rather. . .”

Pepper plucked the condom out of his hand. Unlubricated, marketed as “ultra-sensitive.” “No, this is good.”

“Huh,” Tony interjected from above them, hands behind his head and the picture of x-rated repose. “I didn’t even think about condoms.”

Jim rolled his eyes, grin widening. “That’s because you’re an idiot, Tone.”

Tony grinned back. “Maybe. But I’m not the only person on this bed still wearing clothes, Rhodes.”

“All right, all right, I can take a hint,” Jim said, and flopped back to pull his underwear off.

That was a distracting sight, but Pepper had a mission and now she had the tools she needed to complete it, so she tore the foil open and slid the condom down over Tony’s cock, following her hand with her mouth just to prove to herself she could still take someone down to the root if she put her mind to it. She might have been feeling a little competitive – after all, Jim had a lot of advantages over her if they were going to compete for who could get Tony off best.

Pepper was still in the exploratory phase when Jim’s hand on her ass distracted her. He ran it along her flank, then dipped down to tease at the folds of her cunt. It felt shivery-good, but that wasn’t what she wanted to focus on right then, so she batted him away.

“Just watch for a bit.”

Then she went to work. Tony was less vocal than she expected, given her experience of the man in other contexts, but he was still pretty easy to read. When she swirled her tongue around his tip he caught his breath, thighs tensing; when she took him deep he cradled the back of her head with his hand, encouraging but not forcing her deeper. When she brought a hand up to stroke lightly behind his balls he began to pant and his grip switched to pulling her back.

His voice was tight. “I’m close Pep, so close—“

So Pepper sucked harder, keeping up the teasing rub and working her other hand up and down his shaft, and she was rewarded with a grunt and a twitch of his cock as he filled the condom.

When he was shivering again from over-stimulation Pepper pulled off. Jim’s eyes were avid on the pair of them, his hand wrapped absent-mindedly around his own erection. Pepper worked her mouth a little to loosen the muscles in her jaw, then she launched herself at him.

She only kissed him for a moment before he shifted his mouth away from hers, making a moue of distaste. “Latex.”

Pepper shrugged. “You get used to it.”

But if he didn’t like it, there were other targets for her mouth. She focused on the spots she had found on his throat while she fumbled in the drawer for another condom. Tony revived himself enough to help in that hunt, and then Pepper was sheathing Jim’s cock. This condom was lubricated, and Pepper spared a moment to wonder if Tony was hinting or just not paying attention. But as it suited her purposes admirably, she didn’t bother to ask.

Instead, she straddled Jim and slid down his length until he was buried to the hilt, loving the stretch and the fullness. She exhaled slowly, wriggling a little to feel Jim flex inside of her. His mouth had fallen open and his eyes were glued to the place where they were joined. Pepper pushed her hips forward in an aborted thrust just to watch him bite his lip at the sight.

Then Pepper began to ride him, concentrating on the drag of his shaft against her inner walls, slick enough to be smooth but not so slick that it dulled sensation. Lifting up and settling back down in an upright position was doing incredible things to her nerve endings, but part of Pepper wanted to be closer, wanted to be kissing Jim; instead, Tony took over that job, curling into Jim’s shoulder and sucking and nibbling hungrily on his bottom lip.

Sooner than Pepper would have liked Jim was gasping and panting, hands flexing against his sides to keep from grabbing her hips to give him something to pound into. When his silence broke into scattered curses, Pepper took pity and sped up, clenching against him to send him over the edge. He groaned, low and long, and in his sudden stillness she felt as he unloaded inside her, filling another condom.

She waited out his aftershocks, then pulled off to settle down on Jim’s side opposite where Tony lay. The two men were still trading lazy kisses, and Pepper was struck again by how right they looked together, how perfectly matched and complete in themselves.

Normally, Pepper advocated for her own orgasms when she had sex. But when Tony pulled away from Jim to begin crawling between her legs she pushed him back with a simple and sincere “I’m good.” And she was. The throb between her legs was more satisfaction than hunger, and she felt the burn in muscles that hadn’t been worked in far too long.

More satisfying was the way Tony then shifted to flank her, so she was warmed and protected on both sides. Jim wrangled the blankets out from under them so they could curl up inside, and Tony demonstrated that he was truly a child of the 80s by clapping the lights off, and then they fell asleep naked and tangled together.

The next morning, Pepper woke up smiling.


	6. Chapter 6

Pepper came downstairs wearing a pair of clean boxers from the dresser and Jim’s flannel shirt. She could smell coffee, so she headed into the kitchen humming.

Tony and Jim were already there, huddled around something on the counter, and when they looked up to see Pepper walking in the door they both looked gutted.

Tony’s eyes flashed and he set his jaw, coming around the island to crowd Pepper back into the doorway.

“Your grandmother’s name was Virginia.”

It was such a non sequitur all Pepper could do was gape. “Yes?”

“Which makes you Virginia Potts.”

And glancing over Tony’s shoulder Pepper could see now that the object they had been huddled around was the Sunday New York Times, folds still crisp from just being spread open. It was displaying that photo of her and Mr. Stane dancing at the charity gala a few months ago, his hand low on her back and her giving him her “the press are watching” smile. Of course.

She closed her eyes, wishing she had stayed upstairs. Things were good upstairs. “Yes.”

Tony’s voice was tight and shaky. Pepper felt the air move, heard the pad of his feet on the tile as he began to pace.

“What agenda are you working here? Are you in on it with Obie, two steps ahead of prosecution yourself? You looking for a figurehead to install now that you’ve ousted him? Here to offer me some sort of bribe? Blackmail? What is it?”

He punctuated the last question by grabbing and throwing the newspaper toward the trash, startling Pepper into opening her eyes again. Then Jim was there, pulling him back to the other side of the island where Tony leaned on the counter and buried his face in his hands.

Pepper was frozen, mind racing, trying to figure out why Tony was taking her identity so personally. But all she could focus on was his face, normally so handsome, now contorted with rage and hurt. It made her panicky.

Jim was back on her side of the island, but well out of reach, and his back was ramrod straight, shoulders squared. He was very deliberately blocking her view of Tony.

“Whatever your goal here, Ms. Potts, Tony will not participate. So it would be best if you packed your belongings and went on your way.”

Tony was still recognizable in his anger, but Jim. . . this Jim was a stranger, icy and scrupulously polite and implacable.

Pepper was tempted to do exactly as he demanded, because however politely worded that was a demand. But first she had to understand.

“I don’t know what you think you know about me,” she ventured, “but the only reason I’m here is my broken alternator and you both asking me to stay.”

Tony scoffed just out of sight. His voice, when he spoke, was muffled by his arms. “Right. You expect us to believe it’s a _coincidence_ that the architect of the downfall of Stane Industries had her car break down outside the very town where Tony Stark lives.”

Oh, Jesus wept.

Take away the goatee, the crow’s feet, the muscles through the chest and back, and yes, Tony was Stane Industries founder Howard Stark’s disinherited gay son. (Well, given recent evidence, bisexual son.) It all made a horrible sort of sense now: from MIT to a quiet life in backwater South Dakota; the oddity that was a roboticist who didn’t use S.I.-stamped parts; Rhodey’s insistence that he had cost Tony far more than he thought he was worth.

Another well poisoned before Pepper was even on the scene, and Pepper was again left standing in the ruins.

No, being kicked out of the ruins.

She nodded sharply, then turned on her heel to get to her packing. The longer she stood around here the more good daytime driving hours she burned.

She didn’t let her eyes spill over until Spearfish had disappeared over the horizon behind her.

* * *

A day and a half later, just before the early sunset, Pepper found an inexpensive extended-stay motel down south of the harbor on the Manitowoc lakefront. Then she bought a cheap bottle of vodka and got completely plastered.

The problem was, now that she had reached her destination, Pepper really had nothing to do. She bought a new cell phone and checked her messages, but other than a few updates from Christine and from Agent Coulson she deleted everything else only a few words in. No, she had absolutely no interest in commenting on the trial of her former employer from the wreckage of her fifteen-year career. That was why she had fled L.A, you’d think these reporters would take a hint.

But after she cleared her voicemail and her inbox, she had absolutely nothing to fill her days with. She was unemployed, probably unemployable in anything even vaguely related to her former field, and one of these days she would be called to testify in a process she would take weeks, maybe even months.

If she were a better person, Pepper would probably have found somewhere to volunteer, some worthy cause that always needed a willing pair of hands. But Pepper wasn’t, ultimately, a very good person, so instead she sat in her motel room and brooded.

She watched a lot of Law & Order. She didn’t go down to her high school – Tony sneering her name still rang in her ears, she had no desire to hear it from anyone else.

She couldn’t escape the memory of that golden week and a half, basking in the glow from Jim and Tony’s clear happiness with each other, the way that happiness spilled out to include her so briefly. One weekend when she was feeling particularly maudlin, she drove out to Silver Creek Park. It was one of those unexpectedly warm late-fall days, the sky a clear, hard blue and a brisk wind blowing off the lake. The park was crowded with people getting in one more picnic or barbecue before winter, so Pepper ducked down one of the less-used paths, crunching through a thick bed of fallen leaves.

It had been over twenty years since she was last here, but Pepper’s feet still knew the way. Ten minutes down the trail, until the sounds of kids at play had muffled and retreated; a left at the fork and then another quick left through a pair of beeches growing so close together their branches were intertwined; then push through the increasingly dense undergrowth until you stumble onto a little patch of bare dirt leading to a rocky outcropping overlooking the park’s eponymous creek.

Some time in the intervening years a tree had fallen, its desiccating trunk providing the perfect perch to watch the trickling water; when Pepper’s parents had brought her here as a kid, they had just spread a blanket on the stone.

Pepper might have climbed this very tree, back then; most of her memories of the overlook are from up high. She would climb as high as the branches would take her, then sprawl boneless on her stomach, draped across the rough bark of a likely looking branch. She always brought a book — even in her earliest memories she knew these picnics weren’t for her — but when the book’s charms palled, Pepper would find herself unwillingly drawn to the tableau below.

They came to the overlook exactly twice a year, no matter the weather — May 3rd and August 12th, the anniversaries of her parents’ first date and their wedding. Pepper never understood why they brought her with them; they seemed to forget she was there as soon as they spread the blanket, cuddling close and feeding each other from the picnic basket. As soon as she was old enough to stay by herself, she refused to go; but in the years that she bore reluctant witness she had never been able to articulate how it felt, to be a outsider in her own family, a voyeur.

When the feeling got too big to handle, Pepper broke off a twig (or five) and pelted her parents from above. That tended to break them apart, get her dad racing up the branches after her and her mom laughing hard enough to spill her punch.

Pepper gave up tree-climbing sometime early in high school when a boy loudly claimed he could see her panties up the leg of her shorts, and she was now far less sanguine about whatever creepy-crawly things might be lurking in tree trunks, so she sat somewhat gingerly on the trunk.

She wanted to be happy that Rhodey and Tony had each other, that their relationship was so solid that she was no more than a blip, an odd little speed bump that barely even slowed them down. She could still picture Father Mark’s wise, compassionate face as he counseled her to be happy that her parents had reunited so quickly in the afterlife, barely six months between her mother’s death and her father’s. But then, as now, she just felt bereft; it was harder, in some ways, to have been granted access that terrifying intimacy this time and then have it snatched away.

But she was all cried out by that point, so she just stared, dry-eyed, at the swift-moving water below.

* * *

She realized she had lost track of the days when she went out and was baffled to find everywhere closed, and it took her almost an hour to put two and two together and figure out that it was Thanksgiving. At that point she knew she had to do something to give shape to her days, and maybe help out her dwindling bank account.

So she began haunting the Craigslist jobs listings looking for unskilled temp work, one-time jobs where nobody was going to need references. She cleaned some kid’s studio apartment in preparation for a parental visit; she filled in for a dog bather on bereavement leave at a high-end grooming salon; she participated in any number of psych studies and consumer surveys.

And just after the New Year, she agreed to drive someone’s pet snakes to Gillette, Wyoming.

Maria was a young woman, probably not even twenty-five, whose employer was transferring her just over a thousand miles overnight. She was just renting a room and so was able to pack up her belongings into a couple suitcases; but she had four ball pythons that she had kept as pets since she was a kid, and she didn’t trust FedEx to get them there alive. So she needed to hire someone to drive them, and she was willing to pay for gas, three nights in a motel room (one on the way out, one there, and one on the way back) plus five hundred dollars.

It was ridiculous amount of money for three days’ work, and Pepper was beginning to watch the depletion of her liquid funds with trepidation, so she felt she had to take it. Even though the only route that made sense would take her directly through Spearfish again.

After all, she couldn’t avoid the I-90 for the rest of her life.

Maria’s flight was just hours after Pepper met her, so Pepper took the snakes back to her motel room that night. They were quiet companions, spending most of their time curled up in balls in the long, shallow, clear Rubbermaid containers Maria had given Pepper to transport them in. Pepper didn’t bother to wake early; Manitowoc was small but it did have a morning rush hour, and since she was taking the fifteen hour drive in two stages, she figured she could afford to wait until the traffic had cleared before hitting the road.

The first day was uneventful. Cold, of course; Pepper was driving through Wisconsin and Minnesota in January, the high for the day wasn’t even 10 degrees. Pepper was a little bundled up, because Maria had instructed her to keep the car on the cooler side so the snakes could self-regulate their temperature by moving closer to or further from the heat packs. She had to make frequent stops to crack the containers for increased air exchange (and to refill her coffee, and to offload that coffee when it had worked its way through her system), but the traffic was light and the rest stops were frequent, so it was a nice, easy drive to Sioux Falls. The only incident of note was a truck kicking up a pebble that hit and dinged Pepper’s windshield in the early afternoon.

A little after six, she did a bit of price shopping online then got a room at a cheap motel on the outskirts of the city, one that was big enough that her room was far from the office so she could sneak the snakes inside the room unobserved.

She woke the next morning to a cold, sunny day, grabbed a croissant and some coffee from the pitiful continental breakfast provided by the motel, then snuck the snakes back out and got back on the road.

There was less traffic in South Dakota, and the rest stops were farther apart. Sometime in the early afternoon Pepper noticed an ominous-looking storm cloud on the horizon, very slightly south of her heading; she just crossed her fingers and hoped she’d be able to avoid it when the 90 jogged northward. But as time passed, though Pepper got closer to it, the storm didn’t appear to be moving at all, so Pepper began to feel less concerned.

Or perhaps she just got more distracted by the approaching border, and the fact that the distance to Spearfish had begun appearing on the highway signs.

She glanced down at the speedometer and discovered that she had dropped five miles below the speed limit. _Idiot_. She forced herself to bring the car back up to 70 mph, eager to get through the town.

When she passed the “Thank you for visiting Spearfish” farewell sign at the town limits, her heart lifted, and she loosened her jaw. There was a cargo truck ahead of her, and she began to put on a bit more speed so that she could pass it.

Then the truck. . . shimmied, and swerved first to the right and to the left, and Pepper felt a sudden wind buffet her car. She froze for a moment, watching in horror as the truck toppled, flipping onto its side in the middle of the highway.

It completely blocked both lanes.

Pepper slammed on her brakes, listening to the rubber screech against the asphalt, trying to calculate how much distance she needed to come to a complete stop at highway speeds. Thankfully there was no one on the road behind her, but the trailer extended even into the narrow right shoulder, meaning Pepper had to find a way to stop completely, had no way to go around.

She took a split-second to be grateful to Tony for checking her brakes when the car pulled up with several feet to spare.

Pepper just stared, freaked, for a bit; then she shook herself, flipped on her hazard lights, and backed up to park on the shoulder. There hadn’t been any movement yet from the cab of the truck. She unbuckled her seatbelt and reached to open the door; it took all her strength to push it out against the still-gusting wind, and as soon as she was clear the wind slammed it behind her.

She had to inch toward the wreck, hunched over to present a smaller surface area, and she probably looked like a drunk the way she was veering across the road at the wind’s whims.

When she reached the cab, she had to circle around to see in the windows, careful of the heat radiating off the engine. The driver was visibly struggling against her seatbelt and Pepper felt herself sag in relief.

“Are you okay in there?” She shouted to be heard over the wind, and banged a fist lightly on the surprisingly-unbroken windshield to get the driver’s attention.

The driver paused in her struggling to flash Pepper a thumbs-up, then gestured that Pepper should call 911. Pepper cursed herself for not bringing the phone with her, gave the driver a thumbs-up in return, and made the trek back to her car. Halfway back the wind died down suddenly, and Pepper was able to turn her stumble into a jog.

She dialed as she jogged back once more toward the wreck, scanning the road behind them for any other vehicles. As she rounded the cab again she was happy to find that the driver had pulled out some sort of multi-tool and gotten out of the seatbelt, and Pepper watched as she turned off the engine and clambered up the seat to flip open the door at the top of the overturned vehicle. She hoisted herself out, and Pepper cradled the phone between her cheek and shoulder so she could help the woman clamber down onto the road.

They had both retreated to Pepper’s car by the time Pepper got through to emergency services, and Pepper was pleased to find her voice barely shook at all as she was reporting the accident.

As she was disconnecting the call, Pepper took her first deep breath since slamming on her brakes, and she discovered that the air was _warm_.

She blinked, looking around wildly for some sign of fire, but saw nothing alarming beyond the storm cloud still hovering off to the left. But she would have sworn that she could hear the snow melting on the side of the road.

The driver was cursing under her breath, leaning against Pepper’s hood and probing gingerly at her head. Pepper put aside the mystery of the sudden warmth in favor of grabbing the minimal first aid kit she had in her trunk to help clean the small cuts the driver had on her face and arm from the shattering of the driver’s side window.

They had just had time to exchange names when Pepper heard an engine approaching and looked up.

And of course, because this stretch of highway was apparently cursed as far as Pepper was concerned, as soon as she could make out the driver Pepper saw it was Jim.

He did a double-take when he recognized her, face flickering with more emotions than Pepper could recognize. But he did have an accident site to secure, so he set his jaw and nodded decisively at her, lifting a hand to tell her to wait by her car, then gestured for the truck driver, Bits, to come take him around the scene.

Pepper did her best to fade into the background. She set about getting her part of the scene as comfortable as she could – turning off the car, taking the opportunity to air out the snakes, and taking off her coat because it really was bizarrely warm. The scene grew over the next couple hours. At first, several more cars arrived to be stopped by the accident, stacking up across both lanes and blocking any chance Pepper might have had of turning around and heading back to an offramp; but eventually the police or highway patrol must have rerouted traffic, because at one point Pepper looked up and realized that no cars had been added to their number in at least forty-five minutes. An ambulance came screaming up and a pair of EMTs examined Bits for injury, replacing Pepper’s bandages with better quality gauze and tape, but then they heading back the way they came from. A couple tow trucks arrived, and began the fascinating process of tipping the truck back onto its proper side.

Jim was still busy overseeing the whole scene, so another officer took Pepper’s statement. She could feel that Jim’s eyes kept finding her in the crowd, however.

And it just kept getting warmer. Pepper took off another layer, and began to worry that, instead of freezing, the snakes would overheat. She shifted their containers out of the direct sun, and opened the windows to keep the inside of the car cool.

The highway took on an eerie light as the sun began to set, falling behind the thick mass of clouds still hovering persistently over the hills off to the left. It occurred to Pepper that she should call Maria, let her know she’d be later than anticipated but that the snakes were fine, so she did that. One of the other motorists, a white man probably in his 60s, wandered over, introduced himself as Reg, and determinedly engaged in small talk. Pepper mostly ignored him, but did learn that they were all here at the mercy of a Chinook wind, an utterly bizarre weather pattern that was fairly common in this part of the country.

When the truck was fully righted at last, the crowd let out a ragged cheer and began heading back to their cars. Pepper remained leaning against the driver’s side door, wondering if she was really going to get through this mess without interacting with Jim at all. The thought was surprisingly disheartening.

Just as the tow truck driver finished hooking up the truck’s cab for towing and Pepper concluded that Jim wasn’t going to try to talk to her so she should start her car, Pepper felt a breeze ruffle her hair. Unlike the gust hours earlier that started the afternoon’s disaster, this breeze was cold, coming from the northeast. It was a cool tickle at first, but quickly began picking up speed.

In a matter of moments, the temperature plummeted back down, and Pepper watched in slightly-horrified fascination as everyone’s windows frosted over. Realizing her own windows were still down, she fumbled for the door handle and turned the key in the ignition so she could roll them back up. She had just gotten them back up and was fumbling to get back in her layers when she heard an ear-piercing crack.

She didn’t even have to look to know, with one-hundred percent certainty, that her windshield had just fractured.

She hadn’t been on speaking terms with God since her parents’ deaths, but Pepper had to look up at the sky at that. “You have got to be fucking kidding me with this.”

As God didn’t answer, Pepper turned back to the car to survey the damage. The crack extended probably five inches right through the middle of the glass, radiating from the divot where the pebble had gotten her the day before. It was definitely too large to drive the rest of the way to Gillette without fixing first.

None of the other cars had had their windows break, so after a few extra minutes to defrost they began moving out as the cops directed, making their way down the highway on the opposite shoulder, which had already been swept clean of debris. Pepper got in the car and began her own defrosting process, turning on the heat as well for the snakes; a glance at the clock inside told her she might just have enough time to get to somewhere that could do the repairs before they closed, so she began googling.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Jim begin to head over, snagging his jacket from his marked SUV on the way.

His mouth was quirked in suppressed amusement, and Pepper wanted to scream.

“So we meet again.”

Pepper pulled her professionally frosty air on, overwhelmingly conscious of her unwashed hair, her lack of makeup, and the fact that she probably looked like a stalker. “Indeed. Would you direct me to the nearest windshield repair shop?”

Jim lost his hold on his mouth, letting it curl up in a half-grin, but his eyes were soft and he had his hands tucked into the pockets of his jacket almost bashfully.

“Sure. Gimme a couple minutes to finish up here and I’ll lead the way.”

Pepper’s frustration dissipated, leaving her glumly resigned to what appeared to be her fate. Still, she had to try. “Directions will be sufficient; I’d like to try to get this repaired as quickly as possible, so that I can get back on the road tonight.”

“It’s four thirty. That isn’t happening, Pepper.”

“Still, I’d like to at least get an estimate and a promise that the work can be completed tomorrow. . .”

“Mike’s probably closing up as we speak. But if you wait until I’m free, I can give him a call and make sure he can bring his whole kit out to the house first thing in the morning.”

Oh no. “Thank you for the offer, but if I can’t get this fixed tonight I’ll stay at the Super 8. So if you can arrange for Mike to meet me there, I would be grateful.”

Jim’s grin fell, and he pulled a hand out of his pocket to touch her on the arm, though he thought better of it and pulled back before actually making contact.

“Pepper. Come back with me, spend one more night in our guest room. We’ll talk everything out.”

Pepper couldn’t imagine that going well, but Jim didn’t seem to be holding a grudge, and the repairs would probably eat up everything Pepper had planned to make on this job. She rubbed a hand over her forehead tiredly, then assented. “All right.”

Jim’s smile seemed genuinely pleased, and he nodded sharply before heading back to speak to the other officers. It was more than a few minutes, but eventually Jim motioned for her to follow him and slid into his SUV to drive away.

Night fell fast around them; it was completely dark by the time Pepper pulled into the drive behind Jim. Save the snow on the ground, the house looked the exactly the same as the first time Pepper had seen it, down to more rooms lit than one person could possibly be using at once.

Jim kept going down the drive, presumably to pull into the garage; after a moment of indecision, Pepper parked the car in front of the house and waited for him there. She had to keep the snakes warm, after all.

Oh. She probably should have warned Jim about the snakes before following him home.

Luckily, he took her four additional guests in stride, just asking if they were venomous before agreeing that they’d be fine as long as they stayed in their boxes. Then he grabbed the stack from her, leaving her with only her suitcase to wheel in right behind him.

And he must have called Tony from the car, because Tony was waiting for them, bottle of wine open but unpoured on the table in front of him.

Tony stood when they came through the door, mouth quirked up in a tentative smile. That lasted until he caught a glimpse of the containers in Jim’s arms. “Wha—are those snakes?” His expression of surprise and dismay was comical in its exaggeration, and he switched gears from striding toward them to nearly fleeing, taking up residence on the other side of the far armchair.

Jim grinned at Tony’s distress. “Yeah. Pepper brought an entourage with her this time.”

It was of course too much to hope that both men would be comfortable around snakes. Pepper rushed to reassure. “They’re secure in the tubs – they have clamp locks. And I’ll keep them in the bedroom, of course, with the bedroom door closed as well.”

Tony pulled himself together, taking on an air of studied nonchalance. He even waved her comments away. “It’s fine. Just took me by surprise.” And Pepper took that as her cue to sidle past Jim towards the bedroom.

Jim’s boyish delight in Tony’s distress melted away when Tony was out of sight, and it was his turn to reassure her. “He’s not really that scared – he doesn’t have a phobia or anything. I just like to startle him sometimes, remind him that he’s not the only one who can be a little bit of a loose cannon.”

Pepper bit her lip, still feeling off-balance. “Okay.”

Jim set the tubs down on the floor, and Pepper set to work spreading them out and cracking the tops to take a look at how the snakes were doing. Jim said he’d leave her to settle in, and headed back out to Tony.

Once Jim had closed the door behind him, Pepper sat back on the floor, leaning her head against the side of the bed and closing her eyes. She didn’t even know what she was hoping for here. A farewell fuck? Because realistically, that had to be all that was on offer. Jim and Tony had a good life here, one that was complete in and of itself. It didn’t really have any space for Pepper in it, not long-term.

And even if they made space for her, what then? Someone, someday would sniff out that the woman who brought down Obadiah Stane was fucking Tony Stark, and then she’d end up bringing this quiet, peaceful life down around all their ears. There was no future here.

And really there was barely any past either -- nothing but a week and a half of conversations filled with unexpected landmines and even more unexpected comfort, and a little heavy petting. One night of bodies slick with sweat, followed immediately by the cruelest morning she had ever woken to. Something to remember, surely; but nothing to build the rest of her life on.

She opened her eyes and discovered that the bedroom bore out this conclusion. The furniture was unchanged, but everything else was different. The knickknacks on the dresser had been cleared off, the bedding and curtains changed out, a new landscape mounted on the wall. The haphazard pile of crosswords was gone, as was the joke can of mace Pepper had been unable to bring herself to pack. The room was utterly impersonal now. It hadn’t even held her personality to begin with.

Pepper shivered, then pushed herself to her feet. Might as well get this conversation over with.

* * *

Jim and Tony were seated next to each other on the couch, not talking. They both watched her solemnly as she made her way into the room. Pepper refused to take what she had come to think of as her usual seat, so she perched on the edge of the straight-backed wooden chair opposite.

“Thank you for putting me up again. I am very much indebted to your kindness.”

“Fuck that,” Tony interjected hotly. “This isn’t some _service_ —“

Jim laid a restraining hand on Tony’s thigh, and Tony subsided into silence again. Pepper waited.

Jim took a deep breath, then spoke. “We want to apologize.” Tony nodded once, decisive. “We jumped to conclusions—“

“—reasonable conclusions—“ Tony muttered under his breath, turning it into a cough when Jim threw an elbow out to poke him.

Jim continued. “—and didn’t give you a chance to explain. We are sorry for that.”

Pepper blinked. Jim and Tony just watched her, clearly waiting for her response. She cast around for something appropriate.

“That’s fine.”

Something other than that response. Try again.

“I would have been suspicious too. But I really had no idea who you were at any point while I was staying here, and I would never try to use your identity in any way against you.” She thought for a moment more. “Nor would I try to use you for my benefit in some sort of power struggle within S.I.” There. That was her position.

They both stared blankly at her for a moment, but eventually Tony figured out that she wasn’t going to say any more. He clapped his hands together and stood.

“Well, that takes care of that. You want some dinner? I was just reheating last night’s stew when Jim called to say we’d be having a guest, but it’s pretty tasty and there’s plenty.”

Well that was less painful than Pepper was anticipating. She stood as well, ignoring Jim’s baffled look in favor of playing in to Tony’s manic hospitality. “Sure. Stew sounds delicious.”

Dinner was strange. They were all three being painfully polite, making sure the conversation touched only the lightest subjects – how Tony’s students were handling their finals; how Jim’s day had been going before the accident threw a wrench in it; how Pepper came to be in possession of four pythons; the weather. It was deeply uncomfortable, far more uncomfortable than that first dinner, when Pepper was a stranger thrust into their midst.

They didn’t let Pepper help with the clean up.

Pepper paced around their living room, listening-not-listening to the rise and fall of their voices in the kitchen as they did the dishes. When they finished and came to join her, Pepper decided she didn’t want to deal with the strained atmosphere any longer.

“I think I’m going to head to bed – this afternoon really took it out of me, I’m surprisingly tired.”

Tony just set his jaw at Pepper’s lie, but Jim’s eyes widened in alarm. “Pepper, wait—“ He reached out and grabbed her hand. Pepper shivered at the contact, flinching away instinctively before forcing herself to stillness. Jim caught the motion anyway, dropping her hand like it had burned him and looking faintly ill. He swallowed it back, however, and held Pepper’s eyes, all earnestness.

“Please. Don’t leave yet. Let us try having that conversation again.”

Pepper wavered, and Tony decided to throw his voice in with Jim’s. “We can try it with alcohol this time.”

Pepper couldn’t hold back a snort at that. “Yeah. All right. Whatever you’re making, make me a double.”

Pepper tried sitting down again, but the wood chair was really not comfortable, so with a sigh she moved to the other side of the room, taking residence in her armchair again. Some tension leaked out of Jim’s spine at that, so she took it one step further, curling a leg up underneath her.

Tony busied himself at the bar while Jim took his spot on the couch. By unspoken agreement, no one said anything until they had all drained their first glasses and Tony had refilled them.

Then Tony took a deep breath, reached into his pocket, and threw something at her.

Pepper, startled, caught it out of instinct, then looked down to discover it was an envelope with her handwriting on the outside. A peak at its contents revealed the additional five hundred dollars she had left on the bed for them, the only repayment she figured had a chance of being accepted for the nine nights of room and board she had imposed on them.

But apparently it hadn’t been accepted. She looked back up to try and insist, but Tony interrupted her.

“We don’t run a Bed and Breakfast here, Ms. Potts. We didn’t put you up and then ask you to stay because we wanted some sort of payment.” His mouth was hard, but his dark eyes were eloquent, vulnerable.

Pepper fingered the envelope, which was far more worn than she remembered. Like someone had been handling it, maybe carrying it around in a pocket.

“Okay,” she ventured, and when that seemed insufficient, she folded the envelope and tucked it under her leg. Pepper never thought she’d be on this end of the “I am not a whore” conversation.

If Tony could be that vulnerable, Pepper would have to give it a try too. Even if only obliquely.

“What made you change your minds about me?”

Jim leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “An Agent Coulson stopped by a few days after you left. He was looking for you, had tracked you as far as us. Straightened us out a bit.”

“I told him I’d tell him where you were headed if he’d give us your number, but he didn’t go for it, said he ‘kindly declined’ the offer,” Tony added, face full of surprisingly fond disgruntlement. “I think he likes you.”

Pepper felt her lips quirk, despite her attempt at suppression. “I wouldn’t have picked up for a number I didn’t know anyway.”

Jim spread his hands in front of him, palms up. “We thought it was our only chance to find you again.”

“Well, _I_ didn’t think that,” Tony said wryly, “but then when I couldn’t find any digital trace of you I was sorry I didn’t force Agent to cough it up.” He thought for a moment, then continued. “Come to think of it, I don’t know how _he_ managed to track you _here_. It might be a good idea to check and make sure he hasn’t planted a tracking chip on you somewhere, because there’s no way his hackers are better than me.”

Jim lowered his head into his hands with a huff. “Tony, I’ve told you a thousand times, don’t say things like that around me! Don’t you have any respect for my position as an officer of the law?”

Tony grinned, slow and smug. “Nah.”

Pepper smiled too, caught all over again by how easy they were with each other. It hurt more than it did before.

“I am sorry.”

Jim looked back up at her, puzzled. “For what?”

For getting them involved, even tangentially, with whatever shady government agency Coulson worked for. For lying to them for that week and a half, even if it was by omission, even if she didn’t know that the lie was at all relevant to them. For being the downfall of Tony’s father’s life’s work, which Tony had to feel something messy and complicated about.

For bringing the fragile shared happiness of those last few days crashing down around all three of them so abruptly.

She shrugged, taking another sip of her vodka tonic. Her eyes slid to the side, to the fireplace, which was cold and dark despite the freezing temperatures outside. That felt right – the friendly crackling of logs, the radiating heat, that belonged to Before.

She shivered and pulled her other leg up to curl further into the armchair. Jim got up to fix himself another drink. Finally, Tony said what they were all thinking.

“This bites.”

Pepper snorted, and it turned into a helpless giggle. “Wow. Masterful command of the English language there, Mr. Stark.”

Tony slammed his glass down on the coffee table. “Well it does. So I’ll just say it. We missed you, Pepper. You were gone, and I didn’t like it, and Rhodey was guilt-ridden, and Dummy moped all through Christmas. So whatever, things are weird and complicated, us connected like we are. Things are always weird and complicated. You should still come back.”

Jim was gripping his glass tight enough that Pepper could see his knuckles turning white. Tony couldn’t meet her eyes, and the line of his body was stretched tight, quivering.

“I mean, after you offload those slithering nightmare creatures somewhere else, of course.”

Pepper barked out a short laugh, loud in the charged silence. “And what happens when some intrepid reporter tracks me here? Starts thinking we colluded in Obadiah’s downfall? Disrupts your classes, causes a scandal that Jim’s bosses in the police department can’t ignore?”

Tony and Jim gave each other a long look, then Jim turned back to her and took a deep breath. “When that happens — if that happens — we say fuck ‘em all. Tony and I have weathered storms before, and they do pass eventually. And we — the three of us I mean — I think we could be worth it.”

Tony twined his fingers with Jim’s, raised his eyes to meet hers so earnestly. “We can do this Pep. We want to do this. If you still want to.”

And oh, Pepper did. She was terrified, of what might come, and of the intensity in both men’s eyes. But she wanted it.

So she bit her lip, one last second of trepidation, then she smiled. “Yeah. Yeah, let’s do this.”

**Author's Note:**

> And it's done! There is one more bonus fic that I will be posting in this series, but it's not as closely tied to the main fic (and still needs more work) so it won't be up until probably next weekend.
> 
> Many, many, MANY thanks to sanguinity for the beta! Title is taken from "[On Seeing the Wind at Hope Mansell](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/detail/48432)" by Geoffrey Hill. As always, feel free to [follow me](http://phoenixfalls.tumblr.com) on tumblr or [friend me](http://phoenixfalls.livejournal.com) on LiveJournal!


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